The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN)

Despite a new offer by the Afghan government through the High Peace Council, there was not much movement toward government-Taleban talks to end the war peacefully in the past year. Both sides continue to engage in general pro-peace rhetoric, while allowing little to happen in practice. Currently, they are bogged down in a dispute over whether the Taleban political office should be in Kabul or Qatar. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig and Obaid Ali have been looking at peace-related developments in 2017 – following up on our 30 December Afghan migration review for the past year – and found that this disagreement masks larger issues.

After another year of little movement towards peace talks, or even the re-establishment of direct official contacts between the Afghan government and the Taleban, the High Peace Council (HPC) came out with a new proposal. On 6 December 2017, the president-appointed body announced that the Afghan government was willing to allow the largest insurgent movement in the country, the Taleban, to open a political office in Kabul in order to start peace negotiations and asked them to put forward a “mechanism” for how to best conduct talks. There would be no preconditions.

Akram Khpelwak, head of the HPC secretariat, was briefing the media about a council delegation’s visit to Indonesia and said:

If they want to open an office in Kabul, [or] in any other country, and require any facilities before starting peace talks, the Afghan government and the High Peace Council is ready to facilitate it. (…)

If the Taleban want mediation through a tribal elders’ council, Afghan religious scholars, jihadi leaders, [or] Islamic religious scholars, the HPC is ready to start peace negotiations. The HPC and Afghan government would not set any pre-condition for negotiation. The HPC is ready to start peace talks through any mechanism that the Taleban propose. If not, the Afghan people will decide who wants peace and who wants war.”

Khpelwak added that the peace process was not meant “as a surrender.” It was meant as “a national reconciliation process in the light of Islamic and national values.” (see here). He added that the offer of a political office in Kabul to the Taleban was similar to how the government had started peace negotiations with Hezb-e Islami, which ended in a peace deal in September 2016 (AAN analysis here).

Kabul versus Doha

This offer could be read as a new openness to whatever ideas the Taleban might come up with. However, Khpelwak’s statement ignored the fact that the Taleban had previously rejected the idea that the peace deal with Hezb could serve as a blueprint for negotiations with them (quoted here, for example; AAN analysis here).

The Taleban reacted to the proposal by reiterating, in a statement issued by its political office in Qatar that they were in favour of a “peaceful solution of the Afghanistan problem,” but that the Qatar office was the only structure that the Taleban leadership had “authorised” to explore such a solution.

The Taleban further accused the United States and Afghan governments of not being serious about a peaceful solution. They stated: “the opposite side’s anti-peace stand” had been “made plain by its spreading rumours about a possible closure of the Qatar office.”

Indeed, there had been such statements. On 9 December 2017, the Chief Executive’s office was quoted as stating, through its spokesman Jawed Faisal, that the government had received reports that the Qatar office had been misused for “propaganda and for fund raising”(see here and that it merely conferred political legitimacy to the Taleban. The government, Faisal added, would have to look into these reports and decide whether the office needed to be shut down (read media report here). This was followed by Defense Minister Tareq Shah Bahrami who, after participating in a Saudi-hosted meeting of its military anti-terrorism (and anti-Houthi) alliance, told the Saudi-financed daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat on 24 December that “The Afghan government did not expect anything positive from the office and it has not produced anything of note.”

Bahrami’s statement might have been merely a diplomatic gesture to the hosts who, in the shadow of Saudi-Iranian tensions, have entered into a spat with Qatar, attacking its small, but extremely rich and regionally active neighbour, for its alleged support for terrorism (media reporting here). There is also a rivalry about who has the lead in regional relations and possibly even as to who hosts the Taleban office. As The Guardian wrote, the closely allied “Saudi and Emirati monarchies have been pressing for [the office’s] closure since its inception, seeing it as a symbol of Doha’s diplomatic prestige and US-Qatari ties.” There were also reports that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had offered to host a Taleban office before one was opened in Qatar, but the Taleban rejected the tough conditions the UAE planned to impose (read here and here).

Even more importantly, there were reports in the summer of 2017 that US president Donald Trump was pushing his Afghan counterpart to close the Qatar office. As Voice of America (VoA) reported, “there has been no official confirmation of such a request being initiated by the Afghan government,” but, as it added, an Afghan official had anonymously confirmed that such discussions were held when President Ghani attended the United Nations General Assembly in September.

However, there were also statements in October 2017 from within the US government that seemed to indicate that not everyone was in favour of closing the office. The same VoA report quoted US Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, as saying:

“I think the decision will be made shortly,” U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday [3 October 2017], adding that one of the issues was to make sure the right people representing the Taliban are in the office [emphasis added by AAN]. (…)

He [Secretary of State Rex Tillerson] is looking to make certain we have the right people, so it’s just not an office in existence — an office that we can actually deal with.

Internal criticism by serving US diplomats of the proposed closure was reported, a sentiment that was added to publicly by many former leading US diplomats and analysts. James Dobbins and a number of former US envoys to Afghanistan and the region published a joint article in Foreign Policy, titled “Expelling the Taliban From Qatar Would Be a Grave Mistake.” (Read it here.) VoA quoted one of the co-authors with the main argument against such a closure:

Closing the office “would foreclose on the possibility of a negotiated settlement, the only realistic and honorable way to end America’s longest war,” Jarrett Blanc, a former U.S. deputy special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in a recently published op-ed in Defense One, and news and analysis website focused on U.S. defense and national security issues.

With this, the Afghan and the US government run the risk of becoming instrumentalised in regional issues that have nothing to do with Afghanistan and closing down an important communication channel. Despite its ambivalent status resulting from Kabul’s aversion against it from the day of its opening (AAN analysis here), the Taleban office in Doha is a much frequented venue for diplomats and wannabe peace negotiators, as well as those wanting to negotiate ‘cross-line’ access for health workers or vaccination campaigns. Ahmed Rashid called it the “only long-lasting avenue for western governments to meet and try to persuade the group to enter into peace talks” in a commentary for the Financial Times.

As long as there is no viable, mutually accepted alternative – in Kabul or elsewhere – closing this office could hamper attempts to gauge the Taleban’s position and to move them to the negotiating table. It could also be exploited by pro-war hardliners within the movement to argue that Kabul and Washington are not interested in peace and fighting is the only course of action.

From the Taleban’s perspective, opening an office in Kabul – without a fallback position elsewhere – would leave them at the mercy of the Afghan government and US troops in the country. For the time being, an office outside Afghanistan (and Pakistan!) gives the movement some room to manoeuvre independently.

High Peace Council activities

The offer of a Kabul office is part of the HPC’s newly-started activities after former Vice President Abdul Karim Khalili became its head (following the death of his predecessor, Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani), in June 2017. Gailani and the council had been given a prominent public role in the process toward the peace deal with Hezb-e Islami although, in fact, much of the serious negotiations were done through the country’s National Security Council and the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS. Under Khalili, the council has focused on two avenues. First, it has organised a number of gatherings at the local level in order to, as Habib Rahman Fawzi, a member of the HPC, told AAN, bring about “a national consensus on peace-talks”, and to encourage Afghans to initiate peace talks at the local level with the Taleban. (Consensus-building is important, as many in the political class are opposed to peace-making, which is not surprising given the Taleban’s campaign of terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere. In the first half year of 2017, the movement “claimed responsibility for 10 suicide and complex attacks resulting in 318 civilian casualties (93 deaths and 225 injured) – six per cent of all civilian casualties”, according to UNAMA’s last complete data set.) (This does not include IED and similar attacks, which are difficult to attribute, but are known to be widely used by the Taleban over many years.)

However, local level talks have been tried over many years, without bringing the Taleban leaders or any ‘reconcilee’ to the negotiating table. Indeed, a number of Taleban field commanders, who had laid down arms, later re-joined the insurgency when the government failed to ensure their safety or continue payments (read media report here: http://www.tolonews.com/fa/afghanistan/28119-insurgents-do-about-turn-after-joining-peace-process-in-jawzjan, here and here).

Secondly, on the international level, the HPC has also sought the support of Indonesian Islamic scholars to rally arguments against the Taleban’s religious justification of their war, as being against the “foreign infidels and their hirelings,” as it is usually put in Taleban statements. Indonesia, HPC chairman Khalili said, is a country not involved in the Afghan conflict that comes “with a good reputation” among Afghans and with Indonesians forming the largest national grouping of Islamic scholars worldwide (he mentioned their two largest organisations, the Religious Scholars’ Movement – or Nahdat ul-Ulema, in local language – with 91 million members and the Muhammadia Forum with 35 million members). It could, therefore, he said, effectively support peace in Afghanistan and had promised to do so: Indonesian scholars are to attend an international Islamic conference and declare the Taleban’s ongoing war illegitimate (see more here). There is some scepticism about this initiative. Mullah Abdul Salam Za’if, a former Taleban minister and ambassador to Islamabad, who has lived in Afghanistan since 2007, told AAN that the HPC was merely flagging up its visit to Indonesia to try and show it was more active. He added that Indonesia was a country “not that much aware of the Afghan conflict.”

In fact, the HPC has tried several times to organise a conference of international Islamic scholars. This happened as early as 2011 with Saudi and other support, as well as on a bilateral Afghan-Pakistani basis. The first attempts were made in vain (read here). Then, in September 2013, the HPC succeeded with the cooperation of the Ulama Council of Afghanistan and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). An “International Ulama Conference on Islam and Peace” was held in Kabul, after which participants from eight countries issued a declaration saying that

… the current conflict and bloodshed among Afghans clearly have material and political motivations and have no religious basis or justification. Therefore, the Ulama have the responsibility to seek peaceful solutions to the current conflict and end this violence through education and increasing awareness.

The conference also urged both sides of the conflict to seek a peaceful solution. However, its call had no impact on the intensity of the war, and it still fell short of the unilateral condemnation of the Taleban that Kabul was looking for.

Third-party initiatives

The HPC offers came after several new attempts to get direct peace talks with the Taleban started or, at least, that come closer to such an opportunity. This included initiatives from independent organisations. In August 2017, the Pugwash Conference – an international non-government network of scientists that sometimes help to mediate in armed conflict – organised a gathering in Kazakhstan. (Pugwash had been involved in several earlier attempts to facilitate ‘non-official’ talks between Afghans of ‘different parties’ with the aim of preparing formal peace negotiations (AAN analysis here). In the Kazakh capital of Astana, prominent Afghan figures, government officials and Taleban representatives were supposed to take part. According to a participant, the Taleban were not granted visas to attend the conference; the Taleban said their visas were blocked at the urging of the Kabul government. From the government side, only low-ranking diplomats from the Afghan embassy in Moscow attended, according to Faiz Muhammad Zaland, a Kabul university lecturer, who participated as a civil society activist. There were also independent political analysts who delivered speeches. Zaland told AAN the absence of Taleban representatives and Kabul’s low-ranking presence did not help to have any substantial talks and the gathering concluded “without any outcome.”

In November 2017, Pugwash failed for the second time that year to convene such discussions. (1) This time, it had planned that eight Taleban members from the Qatar office, independent political figures, civil society activists and government representatives would meet in Dubai. However, according to an invitee to the gathering, it had to be cancelled because the Taleban, once again, were not granted visas.

Other initiatives faced the same fate. This included a planned three-day meeting in Norway’s capital Oslo from 4 to 6 December 2017 that had to be cancelled. It was supposed to include 40 Afghans, including HPC members, political activists, government officials and Taleban, according to Mullah Za’if, who maintains relations with the Taleban office in Qatar and is well aware of Taleban positions and, therefore, is often invited by third parties to such meetings. Za’if said the cancellation happened because “the Palace interfered.” According to a media report confirmed by diplomatic sources in Islamabad and Afghan participants, a “closed-door conference” with “representatives from 70 countries (…) that provide financial support to Afghanistan” was held instead in Norway in mid-December to explore ways to start a political process in Afghanistan. Afghan government officials and Pakistani diplomats attended, as well as Za’if, according to this source. (2)

Za’if also doubted, when talking to AAN, that the government has any intention of starting direct talk with the Taleban. He sees a sign for this in its blocking of third party initiatives. HPC members insisted, when approached by AAN, that the council would “welcome” third party peace-talk initiatives, but said they should be Afghan-led. HPC deputy chair Habiba Sarobi said the same to ToloNews in December (see here).

At the same time there have been two reports hinting at regular contacts between the Afghan government and the Taleban. Abdul Hakim Mujahed, a member of the HPC Executive Council, was quoted by Afghan media as saying that both sides had held direct talks several times. Before, in late August 2017, the AP’s Kathy Gannon had reported that she had seen “documents describing the conversations between Afghan officials and the Taliban leadership in both Pakistan and the Gulf state of Qatar,” involving intelligence chief Massum Stanakzai – who had “near daily telephone conversations with [the head of the Taleban Qatar office]” Abbas Stanakzai – and National Security Adviser Muhammed Hanif Atmar. Neither Gannon, nor Mujahed, gave details about what had been discussed, although Gannon reported a list of issues the Taleban would like to discuss (which included “amendments” to the current constitution) and that Afghan officials had said, “neither side was ready to agree to public peace talks.”

Official channels

On official channels, other formats designed to explore a way toward peace talks also continued. In April 2017, Russia hosted a third round of multilateral meetings. In the first round, in December 2016, only Pakistan and China were invited. In February 2017, Iran, India and Afghanistan were added, and in April the Central Asian republics were invited to join. According to official Russian media, the US “refused” to participate, despite Moscow’s urging, and the Taleban turned down an invitation as the process, in their eyes, seemed to be motivated solely by the “political agenda” of the organisers.

Afghanistan was represented by Muhammad Ashraf Haidari, its foreign ministry’s director general for policy and strategy – i.e. on a higher level than in the later Astana talks mentioned above, but still mid-ranking. Haidari reportedly told the meeting that the “best venue” for “face-to-face” talks with the Taleban was on Afghan soil (media reporting here and here).

In mid-October 2017, the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG), which comprises of the governments of Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States, resumed its work at a meeting in Oman. This format had stalled 18 months earlier after the killing of Taleban leader Mullah Muhammad Akhtar Mansur by a US drone in May 2016 (read AAN analysis here). Before the meeting, Chief Executive Dr Abdullah said Afghan-Pakistan relations would be discussed at the meeting (quoted here); a Pakistani Foreign Office official countered by saying that Pakistan attended the Oman parley with “low expectations.” A senior Taleban official told VoA his group has “nothing to do” with the QCG process. The participants reportedly agreed to stay quiet over the result of the meeting. At the April meeting in Moscow, the Afghan representative had reportedly criticised the QCG for failing to bring the Taleban to the negotiating table, due to “the members” – i.e. mainly Pakistan – not fulfilling their commitments (media report here).

In late December 2017, the foreign ministers of Afghanistan, China and Pakistan held a trilateral dialogue in Beijing and issued a joint statement calling on the Taleban to join the peace process “at an early date,” while reaffirming that it needed to be broad-based, inclusive and “Afghan-led, Afghan-owned” and fully supported regionally and internationally.

A new ‘Istanbul format’?

Over the last few days, in mid-January 2018, another reported meeting format created waves in the press. Several media reported “four-party talks” bringing together representatives of two Afghan Taleban factions (i.e. the mainstream and the dissident group led by Mullah Rassul, AAN background on them here), the Afghan government and Hezb-e Islami . This was not the first time such a format has been reported (see here a Pakistani media report from October 2017).

The government, the HPC and the Taleban, however, immediately denied any involvement. Shah Hussain Murtazawi, deputy spokesman for the president, was quoted as saying that presidential advisers Homayun Jarir and Abbas Basir had participated in Istanbul in a personal capacity. Jarir is a son-in-law of Hezb-e Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Basir was the head of HPC chairman Abdul Karim Khalili’s office when he served as second vice president (from 2009 to 2014) and a member of Khalili’s Shia/Hazara-dominated Hezb-e Wahdat-e Islami (Islamic Unity Party). HPC general secretary Khpelwak also denied the council’s engagement in the talks. He said it was not an HPC initiative and the HPC was not formally represented (read media report here). Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahed wrote on his Twitter account that “reports about delegation of IEA participating at talks in Turkey are baseless. We have neither sent any delegation nor can any participant represent the Islamic Emirate”.

The two confirmed participants on the ‘Taleban side’ were Mawlawi Abdul Rauf, a businessman close to the dissident Taleban group, and Abdul Halim Barits, originally from Kandahar, who has no known link with the Taleban. Rauf was reported by some media to be the deputy head of the dissident Taleban, but two sources close to the group that AAN spoke to denied that he held this function. (3)

Nevertheless, Rauf, who gave a much-discussed interview to Afghan Tolo TV on 14 January 2018 (see here), where he described himself as “the leading member of the Taleban delegation in Turkey” and representing “the entire Taleban view on inter-Afghan peace talks.” (This might have led to some misreporting, but is consistent with the dissident faction’s self-representation as the ‘true Taleban.’) Rauf also claimed there had been three rounds of unofficial talks in Turkey between government and ‘Taleban representatives’ already, including the recent meeting.

Conflicting narratives

Any progress toward meaningful peace talks is severely hampered by different approaches, priorities and narratives from the actors involved. All of this discord appears to be a cover for an actual unwillingness by both sides to talk, at least under the current circumstances. The Afghan government continues to see Pakistan as the main adversary in the conflict and the main actor behind the Taleban. It denies that the Taleban act (or are able to act) on their own behalf. President Ghani, for example, when addressing a joint session of the Afghan parliament in April 2016, said Taleban leaders sheltering in Pakistan were “slaves [of Pakistan] and enemies of Afghanistan who shed the blood of their countrymen” (read media report here). There are other accusations. Chief Executive Dr Abdullah, for example, during his US visit in November 2017, accused the Taleban of helping “other groups, such as Daesh and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to shelter in Afghanistan”. The Taleban answered back by continuing to call the Afghan government “puppets of the West.” The US’s main objective, they allege, “is to use Afghanistan as a military base to reach their colonialist goals” (see the statement quoted above).

The government’s view of the Taleban was reflected by Ghani’s approach immediately after taking up office in September 2014, when he embarked on an attempt to push Pakistan – with the help of China and the US (via the quadrilateral group) – to bring the Taleban to the negotiating table (read here) and see AAN analysis of Murree talks here). (4) When this failed, Ghani suggested that peace needed to be made directly with Pakistan. In his Eid message in August 2017, he stated Afghanistan was “ready for a political negotiation with Pakistan and peace with Pakistan is in our national agenda”. In May, he also announced the start of a new “Kabul process” (official statement here) which he described as:

… reaching out to regional neighbours and the wider international community to secure their support to end the war in the country. (…) The Kabul Process aims to secure support for an agreement to end support for cross-border terrorism. The President said (…) the peace deal with Hezb-i Islami, the first such negotiated end to hostilities in four decades of war, showed that peace is possible. (…) He [also] pointed to the local deals made in Zabul Province, where Daesh and the Taliban were defeated, and their fighters reintegrated, by local villagers.

He apparently hoped that the revival of the Quadrilateral Contact Group (QCG) might serve this purpose, but so far nothing visible has come out of it. While the QCG could facilitate, such an approach would ultimately require the highest-level diplomacy between Afghanistan and Pakistan, involving the Afghan president and those who determine Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy, the military – and yet another thaw in their currently icy relations.

Za’if and MP Sayed Ishaq Gailani, who was also a participant in several meetings involving Taleban, both see a “lack of trust” as the main hurdle for serious government-Taleban contacts. On the part of the Taleban, Gailani told AAN that this has been caused by Ghani’s failure to fulfil promises made ahead of the 2014 elections. “Direct talks with the Taleban,” he told AAN, “was one of the commitments that President Ghani made.” According to him, Ghani met Taleban representatives in Dubai, promising them to start direct talk if he won the election. “As soon as he became the president,” Gailani said, “instead of reaching out to Taleban, he turned to Pakistan to force the Taleban to the negotiating table.” He added the Afghan government “wants the Taleban to surrender, which is not possible.”

The Taleban have also shown no flexibility toward the government. Apart from their insistence on the recognition of their Qatar office, they did not react to Kabul’s proposal to present a ‘mechanism’ for talks. This does not need to be a sign of rejection, particularly as the ‘mechanism’ and the Kabul office offer are not necessarily tied to each other, i.e. one could be pursued without the other one. It is also imaginable that both sides agreed that it was not necessary, at least for the time being, to stick to one venue of talks. Even so, some initiative has yet to come from the Taleban.

Meanwhile, each side has tried to escalate the war; most recently the US and Kabul with their increased number of airstrikes and targeted killings of militants. Before that, following the withdrawal of most Western combat troops by the end of 2014, the Taleban had launched a campaign of ground attacks to take over civilian population centres. Add to this the current US-Pakistani tensions, which may further harden positions on all sides (on the new US administration‘s policy, AAN analysis here), then the environment is hardly conducive to talking.

More war is likely to strengthen the anti-talks ‘faction’ in the Taleban, and more Taleban terrorist and other attacks to strengthen the resolve of the Afghan government and parts of the population to reject talks. On the Pakistani side, the US president’s latest move to exert more pressure by cutting military aid was widely applauded throughout Afghanistan and has already caused some retaliation. Beyond the already unhelpful Pakistani position (if measured in deeds, not lip-service), Pakistan’s defence minister reportedly announced in early January 2018 that it had suspended military and intelligence cooperation with the United States. (The US embassy in Islamabad said it was not informed about this decision.) Pakistan also continues to control the US’s main access route to Afghanistan and could close down airspace or roads to military supplies. (It has done so earlier, as in 2012, read here).

And the US?

Much depends on the Trump administration’s position. This seems to be clear, if only for the moment. In practice, much of the decision-making on Afghanistan had been handed over to the military on the ground. Its top man there, US/Resolute Support commander John Nicholson, stated in November in Brussels “This is a fight-and-talk approach”. This position does not represent a change in practice, though, compared with the approach followed under president Barack Obama and, particularly, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This did not turn out to work, even though there were many more troops to hand compared to now.

However, on the political side, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson might have shown a way out of the conundrum between the Afghan government and the Taleban. In a speech at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington on 18 October 2017 (full text here), he ruled out a US military withdrawal, but indicated that talks about a timetable could be part of negotiations. At the same time, he created worries in Afghanistan when he indicated that the US administration would leave it to the Afghan sides to choose a political system appropriate to their “culture” in eventual talks. This might be meant as a carrot for the Taleban who demand ‘amendments’ to the constitution. But in practice, Western references to culture often mean green light for less attention to rights issues and democracy. He said:

So it is about a commitment, a message to the Taliban and other elements that we’re not going anywhere. And so we’ll be here as long as it takes for you to change your mind and decide you want to engage with the Afghan Government in a reconciliation process and develop a form of government that does suit the needs of the culture of Afghanistan.

If the issue of an US troop withdrawal is put on the agenda of any future intra-Afghan talks, this requires, of course, a role for the Americans. (This will be the case anyway, despite all the phrases purporting an Afghan lead.)

An author from the Council on Foreign Relations has listed in an article (see here) what else Washington could do in the shorter term “to set conditions for a peace process.” This would include:

“… naming and empowering senior diplomats, aligning regional powers in support of that goal, and ensuring U.S. policy does not undercut Taliban moderates—all while continuing to fight the Taliban, develop Afghan security forces, and strengthen Afghan institutions.”

The issue of a US withdrawal will remain problematic for the Afghan government for quite some time to come. The Afghan forces – and the Afghan state – continue to be dependent on US and other Western support and, therefore, additional US and other troops are being deployed (read for example here). President Ghani has just admitted as much when he told the CBS earlier in January 2018 (quoted here) that Afghanistan would “not be able to support our army for six months without U.S. support, and U.S. capabilities.”

The Taleban will have heard this with interest. It is surely grist to the mill for the non-talks faction. Their military leadership may try to use President Trump’s known aversion to a continued US role in Afghanistan (as expressed before his election), and his tendency for abrupt political reversals by delivering measures that increase US costs. With more US troops on the ground and more involved in direct combat than over the past three years, US military casualties might rise again and contribute to another turn-around, particularly if there is no quick US success.

A summary and what’s next on the agenda

Most of what we were able to report for 2017 illustrates that most of what occurred was bluster, not actual movement. Both sides have continued to occasionally play with the idea of peace talks, but their positions ultimately have remained inflexible and have led to nothing serious coming out out of it – yet again. The Kabul-versus-Qatar office dispute is just one sign of this. The government’s position shows a lack of an appetite for third-party facilitation and even meetings of a non-official character to enable an exchange of positions. This reluctance to look for some common ground and possible ideas to build some trust clearly stands in the way of reconciliation and mediation. This inflexibility keeps the much cited, but non-existing, ‘peace process’ where it has been for years at a rhetorical level. Not for the first time, we have found ourselves skeptical about hyped initiatives and described the “talking about talks” in previous years (see our 2015 dossier here).

Basically, 2017 has been a lost year for Afghan peace.

There is also not much light at the end of the tunnel for 2018. A political breakthrough is not on the horizon. The rather one-dimensional offer by the HPC to the Taleban about an office in Kabul will not change much. However, the offer about a ‘mechanism’ and no preconditions does hold some potential, at least. Instead, a new military escalation is already underway and this is likely to intensify further when the new ‘fighting season’ starts in the spring (see also the International Crisis Group’s outlook, here). (6)

The next diplomatic activity will take place next month when the Afghan government is expected to present the latest update of its peace and security plan, i.e. its strategy on a political settlement with the Taleban, in the run-up to the next meeting of the Kabul Process in late February 2018. President Ghani has set the stage for it by again calling on the Taleban, in a speech on 12 January 2018 at a civil society, youth and women’s conference in Kabul (text here), to join in “inter-Afghan negotiation.” In a contradiction to his idea of making peace with Pakistan first, he urged them not to give their “authority to the neighbouring country.” He also called on the conference participants to give input to the Kabul process meeting which, he announced, would be followed by “regional, Islamic countries and international conferences.” This again, feels more like rhetoric, rather than an actual serious invitation to talks.

Meanwhile, as the war drags on towards its fortieth anniversary since the Soviet military invasion, Afghans continue to die, be injured and be forced to flee their homes in ever larger numbers, whether they are civilian (these casualties last year were at their highest level since 2001), members of the country’s armed forces (who suffer twice more casualties than civilians according to the most recent US figures, see here (5)) or Taleban foot soldiers (whose real casualty numbers are unknown), it remains a bloody waiting game.

Edited by Kate Clark

 

(1) Before that, the Pugwash Conference held five gatherings to discuss peace in Afghanistan. Its first conference held in September 2012 (read Pugwash statement here), in Dubai. It followed with the second conference held again in Dubai, in January 2013, Pugwash held its third conference in Doha in May 2015, the fourth Pugwash conference took place again in Doha in January 2016.

(2) Some media reported that there were also plans for a meeting in November in Dubai organised by an Afghan NGO. This failed as well, as the UAE refused to grant visas to Taleban. Relations between the Taleban and the UAE had soured after the January 2017 attack in Kandahar that killed the UAE ambassador and five of its diplomats. The responsibility for this attack was laid at the Taleban’s door.

(3) The same sources told AAN that group leader Rasul had three deputies: Mawlawi Baz Muhammad, the Taleban’s former shadow governor of Farah, Mansur Dadullah, who was killed in Zabul in November 2015, and Abdul Manan Niazi.

(4) Over the following more than two years, Pakistan and Afghanistan held several rounds of discussions, both bi- and multilaterally, including some at the highest level. But all of this did not lead to substantive results, or a break-through on talks. On the contrary, the relationship between both countries soon soured again when Ghani felt Pakistan, despite accommodating words, was not cooperating. In 2017, the Taleban carried out several deadly attacks, including against a military base in Mazar-e Sharif and against a guesthouse in Kandahar where Emirati diplomats were targeted and killed. (The Taleban vehemently denied any involvement in the Kandahari attack.) Following this, Ghani accused Pakistan of continuing to provide a hideout for the Taleban. In May 2017, he rejected an invitation to visit Pakistan, saying he would not visit until the perpetrators behind the attacks were handed over to Afghanistan (read media report here).

(5) In the same report, the SIGAR revealed that the US forces in Afghanistan have, “at the Afghan government’s request, […] classified or otherwise restricted information about the ANSF’s performance”, including casualty figures.

(6) Many analysts dispute that there still is something like a ‘fighting season’ and a lull in winter, but this US military report to US Congress indicates that this is indeed the case with its graph of “enemy initiated attacks” (read here, p 24).

The need to appoint a new member of the IEC came after its chairman, Najibullah Ahmadzai, was sacked by President Ashraf Ghani on 15 November 2017. The president ordered the Selection Committee, a body responsible for shortlisting candidates for membership of the IEC and ECC, to be reconvened. The body shortlisted three candidates, from which a panel, including the president, chose its favourite on 13 January 2018. AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili looks at the controversy surrounding this selection, and asks what happens next.

This is part four of a series of dispatches about the preparations for the elections. Part one dealt with political aspects and part two dealt with a first set of technical problems: the date, the budget and the debate regarding the use of biometric technology. Part three dealt with the dilemma of the electoral constituencies.

A new IEC member is appointed

On 13 January 2018, President Ashraf Ghani’s office announced that Sayed Hafizullah Hashemi had been appointed as a new member of the Independent Election Commission (IEC). The IEC is made up of seven members, all of whom were appointed in November 2016 (see AAN’s previous report here). One of them, Najibullah Ahmadzai, who also served as its chairman, was dismissed by President Ghani on 15 November 2017. This was due to pressure from political groups amidst widespread controversy surrounding a number of issues, from the preparation of the next parliamentary elections, which is the IEC’s current main task, to the issue of electoral reform. There are also serious doubts as to whether the elections can be held in 2018 (see ANN’s previous report here). Since Ahmadzai’s dismissal, his seat in the IEC had remained vacant. Hashemi was picked by a panel that included President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, Second Vice-President Sarwar Danesh, Chief Justice Yusuf Halim and Attorney General Farid Hamidi. The panel interviewed three candidates introduced by the Selection Committee.

Hashemi was appointed for a five-year term. (Of the seven IEC members, four are appointed for five years and the other three for three years.) It was expected that the new member, Hashemi, would also replace Ahmadzai as the IEC chair, although this will be determined by the IEC members themselves through a process of election. Yet, there are obviously ways and interests to influence this from the outside.

The Selection Committee, which the president reconvened on 28 December 2017, submitted a shortlist of three candidates to him on 11 January 2018. Apart from Hashemi, there were two other candidates: Abdul Qader Zazai Watandost, an MP from Kabul, and Awal-ul-Rahman Rodwal, former head of the IEC’s Kabul office. Watandost’s chances of getting the IEC seat were particularly slim given that he had strongly advocated against the presidential legislative decrees to amend the electoral laws when they were discussed and put to vote in the Wolesi Jirga in June 2016. (See AAN’s previous report here). (1)

The spokesman for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and its representative in the Selection Committee, Belal Sediqi, told AAN that while the 57 applicants represented various ethnic groups, all three candidates proposed by the committee were Pashtun. Article 16 of the electoral law (2) states that any new member should be introduced with due consideration to the ethnic and gender composition of the body. It can be surmised, therefore, that this choice was made in a bid to retain the IEC’s previous ethnic composition, ie to replace the former head of the IEC (who was a Pashtun) with another Pashtun. However, according to Sediqi, even some Pashtuns were unhappy with the choice, as, in their view, Hashemi is a Sayed and not ‘a pure Pashtun’. A person’s ethnicity matters very much in Afghanistan, particularly with respect to appointments. It is often a deeply sensitive issue.

Biographical controversy

Sayed Hafizullah Hashemi is a Pashtun. He is also a Sayed, a particular group that claims descent from the family of the Prophet of Islam. While some believe they constitute a separate ethnic group in their own right, there are Sayeds among all ethnic groups in the country. Hashemi was born on 19 Hamal 1349 (8 April 1970) in Laghman province and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (BBA) from Washington International University (2008). On 16 January 2018, Hashemi told AAN that he obtained his degree through a distance learning programme. He also holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA) from Islamic Azad University, Kabul Branch (2015). He told AAN that he had also enrolled as a PhD candidate at Ferdawsi University in the Iranian city of Mashhad but that he had pulled out for logistical reasons. Hashemi told AAN that he had worked with the commission on the drafting of the constitution in preparation of the Constitutional Loya Jirga that took place at the end of 2003 / beginning of 2004. He then joined the Joint Electoral Management Body (JEMB) as a warehouse manager, a position he left when preparations for the 2005 parliamentary election got underway (it is unclear, though, why he left at such a crucial time). Following this, he worked in several capacities in the former president’s office and, since 2012, as the head of the Meshrano Jirga’s secretariat. (See his biography on the Meshrano Jirga’s website here, Hashemi speaks Pashto, Dari, Arabic and English.

Following Hashemi’s appointment, social media was abuzz with comments that his education documents were allegedly fake. Social media activists in particular referred to his Bachelor’s degree, which, according to his biography on the Meshrano Jirga website, he obtained from Washington International University, a university that these activists claimed to be notorious for selling degrees. (See this media report here). Another confusion was that, according to the English version of his biography), he obtained his Master’s degree from Khpelwak University in Kabul, which does not exist. Hashemi told AAN that this was a mistake by his (former) colleagues in the Meshrano Jirga, who had translated the name of Daneshgah-e Azad Islami (Islamic Free University) into Pashto. (“Khpelwak” means free or independent.).

On 15 January 2018, Sediqi (from the Selection Committee) told the Kabul daily Etilaat Roz that Hashemi’s education documents had been approved by the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE). He said the criterion for the applicants’ education documents’s credibility was whether they had been approved by the MoHE. Arefa Paikar, the spokeswoman for the MoHE, was quoted by the daily as saying that Hashemi’s documents had been processed for approval based on a specific procedure. This, she said, includes whether or not the university is among the list of universities recognised by UNESCO; sending an email to the relevant university for confirmation; and checking the exit and entry date stamps on the applicant’s passport. Paikar confirmed to AAN on 17 January 2018 that Hashemi’s Bachelor’s degree from Washington International University had been attested by MoHE in 1387 (2008) and that she had found a copy of it in the MoHE, which, she said, also had the attestation stamp of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was unsure, however, as to whether this same procedure was adhered to at the time, or whether it had been followed when verifying the validity of Hashemi’s degree. According to article 16 of the electoral law, IEC member/members can be dismissed if it turns out that they have faked their education documents.

 Controversy over the selection committee

There is also ongoing controversy surrounding the body that selected Hashemi and the procedure leading up to the current composition of the IEC. The mechanism for the selection of members of the IEC and the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) is a Selection Committee. (see AAN’s previous reports about its background here and here). The Selection Committee was first introduced in 2013 based on recommendations from civil society organisations and political parties. Since then, it has been enshrined in the electoral law with the responsibility of vetting and shortlisting applicants for membership of both the IEC and ECC, although its composition changed every time the law was amended, often in an effort to include or exclude certain institutions (see previous AAN reporting here).

The electoral law (article 13.1) that was passed by a legislative decree in September 2016 and has since governed electoral bodies and processes (see the changes in the law in AAN’s previous report here) specifies the composition of the Selection Committee as follows:

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 new Selection Committee set to work on 28 September 2016. It comprised the following people: Jawid Rashidi (Pashtun), a member of the Supreme Court, as chair; Yusuf Rashid (Pashtun), representing election-related civil society organisations; Mary Akrami (Tajik), representing women’s rights organisations; Muhammad Zia Langari (Sayed), a member of the AIHRC; and Abdullah Shafai (Hazara), a member of the Commission for Overseeing the Implementation of the Constitution. Following more than a month of deliberations, on 9 November 2016 the committee submitted a shortlist of candidates to President Ghani. Jawid Rashidi, who, as representative of the Supreme Court and who is the head of the Selection Committee by default according to the electoral law, said that, out of a total of 720 applicants, the committee had selected 21 candidates for the IEC and 15 for the ECC. The president-led panel mentioned above interviewed these candidates 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. (See AAN’s previous report here).

On 15 November 2017, President Ghani fired IEC chairman Najibullah Ahmadzai, after divisions within the IEC that led to five of Ahmadzai’s fellow commissioners to write to the president asking for his dismissal. According to article 16 of the electoral law, in case of termination or resignation or death of an IEC member, the president must appoint a new member from the list of the remaining candidates introduced by the Selection Committee. This is according to article 14 of the law, according to which the Selection Committee, from among the candidates for the IEC membership, introduces “21 persons to the president that meet the highest and most appropriate legal standards, while taking into consideration the ethnic and gender composition.” (3) The president then appoints seven out of these 21 candidates.

However, the president ordered the Selection Committee to be reconvened, arguing that none of the remaining candidates on the list were eligible. The decision to reconvene the Selection Committee was opposed, including by members of the committee itself. Yusuf Rashid, the executive director of the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan (FEFA) who represented election-related civil society organisations to the (former) Selection Committee, argued, as reported by Afghan media, that there was “no legal justification for the committee to resume its work.” (Read the postscript in AAN’s previous report here).

On 29 November 2017 the election-related civil society organisations issued a statement boycotting the Selection Committee. (4) They said that they had reviewed presidential decree number 503 dated 4 Qaws 1396 (25 November 2017) on the reconvening of the Selection Committee and “arrived at this collective agreement that the decree is against the electoral law.” However, this argument appears to be somewhat tenuous, as it also disregards the practical need to fill the IEC’s vacant seat – unless critics are able to prove, countering the argument made by the president’s office, that there is indeed an eligible candidate among the remaining candidates. On 8 January 2018, Rashid told Etilaat Roz newspaper that the government had held a few meetings with him, one being with Second Vice-President Danesh. Rashid said that he told them that he did not see any legal justification for reconvening the Selection Committee. Rashid further said that from his meeting with the vice-president, he realised that there had not been any issues regarding the eligibility of the remaining candidates, but that the problem was a political one, namely the lack of agreement among government leaders on one of those candidates. He claimed he had advised that finding a solution to the political problem should not remain confined to the president or the chief executive, and that all the political groups inside and outside the government should be engaged in the discussion. Sources from the international community told AAN that President Ghani had taken a strong stance against earlier advice to engage more political groups in the process of appointing a new member for the IEC. The president’s reaction might stem from the assumption that involving a large number of actors makes decision-making more difficult and thus further complicating and possibly delaying the process.

Article 13 of the electoral law, on the establishment of the Selection Committee, states in paragraph two that, as two different categories, civil society organisations related to elections and to advocating for women’s rights each should introduce one representative to the Selection Committee within seven working days of the date of notification. Otherwise, it is stipulated, the three other members (representing the Supreme Court, AIHRC and ICOIC) should introduce three candidates from each of the two civil society categories to the president, who will choose and appoint two of them to represent these two groups to the Selection Commission. (5) The women’s rights groups sent their representative and as a result of the election-related organisations’ boycott, their representative was chosen by the president. On 30 December 2017, a member of the Selection Committee told AAN that, according to paragraph two of article 13 of the electoral law, they introduced three people to the president, one of whom, Muhammad Asef Safi, was approved.

Safi is the head of the Fair Law Organisation for Women (FLOW). Oddly enough, FLOW was one of the signatories to the 29 November 2017 CSO boycott statement. On 15 January 2018, Rashid of FEFA told AAN that the CSOs summoned Safi and told him that he would not represent them. Rashid speculated that Safi had changed his position because the government had exerted influence on him as he (as well as the two other candidates, Roshan Tseran, director of Training Human Rights for Women Association, and Muhammad Shoaib Naseri, director of Organisation of Fast Relief and Development (FRD) is part of the Open Governance Forum established by the government and that this change of position came after a recent trip he had undertaken with Vice-President Danesh to Indonesia. Safi confirmed these facts in a conversation with AAN on 16 January 2018 but rejected the allegation that he had been influenced by the government. He argued it was normal to participate in a conference which is attended by both government and non-government officials; instead he asserted that he participated in the Selection Committee “to break the stalemate over the process.”

There was also controversy over AIHRC spokesman Sediqi’s participation in the Selection Committee’s choice of Hashemi. Sediqi is not a formal member; he was replacing Langari, who was unwell, and it is not clear whether this was fully legal, given that the electoral law quoted above specifies “one member of AIHRC” to be part of the committee. Like Safi, Sediqi also asserted that he had participated in the committee to break the stalemate.

More manoeuvres

The president’s order to reconvene the Selection Committee in spite of legal concerns by some stakeholders was read by many observers of the Afghan election process as a statement in favour of a particular candidate. For instance, on 9 January 2018, Fazel Ahmad Manawi, a former head of the IEC and close ally of the chief executive, said “They [the government] once again established the committee. It means they want to pave the way for their favourite candidate to become the IEC chief.”

The name of Abdullah Ahmadzai, currently the head of the country office of The Asia Foundation, emerged in particular as a strong candidate for the job, as he seemed to have the support of key international stakeholders. Abdullah Ahmadzai had already served as the head of the IEC Secretariat during the 2010 parliamentary elections. (See AAN’s previous report here).

On 10 January 2018 in conversation with AAN, Abdullah Ahmadzai confirmed that he had indeed been “approached by a few people from the [g]overnment in November 2017 following [the] removal of Mr. Najibullah Ahmadzai from the IEC [c]hairmanship.” However, he had not applied for the vacancy after the Selection Committee called for applications. Ahmadzai wrote to AAN that the electoral law “only provides for selection of a replacement for the vacant position of a commissioner from the list of [the] remaining fourteen applicants previously interviewed by the President, CEO and other panel members. Since there is no provision in the current legislative decree for an alternative, any call for new applications is in contradiction with the current electoral law/legislative decree. Therefore, a consensus-based approach is required, if NUG leaders are looking for alternatives and are unable to select a candidate from the existing roster of 14 applicants for the IEC.”

A source from the international community told AAN that Ahmadzai had been annoyed by the fact that his name was made public for the position before there had been any formal agreement and that he was not in favour of opening another selection process, meaning he expected to be appointed directly, given that the legal procedure had not been adhered to (ie the appointee would not be from among the earlier round’s remaining candidates).

What next?

Based on article 15 of the electoral law, which is about oath-taking, the new member should be sworn in by the chief justice of the Supreme Court in the presence of the president. (6) On 16 January 2018, Hashemi told AAN that he had just been sworn in (see also this press release from the president’s office), but is still waiting to be officially introduced to the IEC by the second vice-president. Paragraph four of article 16 of the electoral law says that if the dismissed (or resigned or deceased) member is also the chair or deputy or secretary of the IEC, there should be a new internal election by the IEC. The IEC will now need to hold an internal election, not only to elect its chair but also its deputy chair for operations, deputy chair for administration and finance, as well as its secretary, who also serves as spokesperson for the IEC as the terms for those in these positions expired almost two months ago. However, IEC members could not hold elections in a situation while the seat of its chair remained empty. (7)

Therefore, on 26 December 2017, the IEC issued a statement saying that in the absence of one member, the election of the chair and other members of the administrative board of the commission remained ambiguous “which undoubtedly visits serious impacts upon the preparations for holding the elections on scheduled date.”

Hashemi told AAN that the IEC’s internal elections would be held next week (namely, after 19 January 2018) and that he would run as a candidate. However he refused to specify for which position and said that he would decide this in consultation with the six other IEC members.

There is one more vacancy at the IEC. On 21 October 2017, Afghan media reported that the president had sacked the head of the IEC Secretariat (also known as the chief electoral officer), Imam Muhammad Warimach. (See this AAN report here) This move, though, was not publicly confirmed by the president’s office. On 8 November 2017, IEC member Maleha Hassan confirmed to AAN that the president, in a meeting with IEC members and representatives of the International Community, had informed Warimach that he was a respected person but could not work for the IEC as its procurement was “in crisis” and appointments were “problematic.” She further said that the IEC had not yet received any official dismissal letter for Warimach, who continues to work in his position.

On 26 December 2017, the IEC issued a statement saying that following the president’s verbal dismissal of the head of the IEC Secretariat, the IEC sent an official letter to the president on 18 November 2017 asking him to send his written instruction to this effect as soon as possible. Following that, on 19 December 2017, the IEC proposed another acting head of the IEC’s Secretariat to the president, but did not receive a response to either of the two letters, according to the above statement. The IEC further said that ambiguity about the fate of the CEO would delay different election-related processes, including recruitment of secretariat staff. (8) On 17 January 2018, IEC spokesman Gula Jan Sayyad Badi told AAN that the person they had introduced to the president was Shahla Haque and that the president had approved this introduction the day before. He further said that Shahla was introduced as the acting CEO and that Warimach had bid farewell to his IEC colleagues. The IEC now needs to introduce three candidates to the president, who will appoint one as the CEO. According to Sayyad, the IEC will start the process after it holds its internal elections (next week).

Conclusion: internal divisions and trust deficit

Prior to the dismissal of the former IEC chairman, the IEC was already suffering from clear internal divisions which were first revealed by IEC member Maleha Hassan on 14 August 2017 during an event held by FEFA. At that time, she alleged that some IEC members had been “marginalised,” decisions were taken “secretly” by a small circle of commissioners and information was intentionally not shared with other IEC members. More than a month later, another IEC member, Mazallah Dawlati, also asserted that chairman Najibullah Ahmadzai, Abdul Qader Quraishi (the deputy for finance and administrative affairs), Gula Jan Badi Sayyad and Rafiullah Bedar were part of a group of IEC members who made decisions “secretly” excluding Hassan, Dawlati and the deputy for operations, Wasima Badghisi. Later on, however, five commissioners jointly wrote to the president asking for Ahmadzai’s dismissal, which the president heeded. (See AAN’s previous report here). Since Ahmadzai’s sacking, the remaining IEC members seem to be working together quite well. It remains to be seen whether the new member joining the IEC will reopen internal divisions or heal them for good.

This also depends on how outside pressure from diverse political groups plays out. Starting in early September 2017, they had increasingly voiced their mistrust in the IEC. Things reached a climax on 7 October 2017 when an umbrella group called “The Understanding Council of Political Currents of Afghanistan” came together and said that the IEC in “its current composition” did not have the “ability to hold transparent and fraud-free elections and is not trusted by the people or the political currents.” It called for the dismissal of all IEC and ECC members and appointment of new members in agreement with political parties, civil society organisations and political figures. (See AAN’s previous report on the members of the group and its demand here).

On 16 January 2018, Shiwa-ye Sharq, the head of Mehwar-e Mardom’s media committee, which is part of the Understanding Council in a conversation with AAN, criticised the selection process as a “unilateral approach” taken by the president, saying that the Understanding Council would soon come up with a statement on the selection committee and appointment of the new IEC member. According to him, the Council would reiterate its demand for the replacement of all electoral commissioners and an inclusive observation framework that should include all political groups.

This shows that the public discussion on the legitimacy and composition of Afghanistan’s key electoral institutions is far from over. The Understanding Council combines some heavyweight politicians and political groups, and its influence should not be underestimated. However, the choice, ultimately, is between speeding up the procedures to hold parliamentary elections as soon as possible or to renew the composition of the two commissions, which will certainly cause further controversy and delay. There are also political forces, such as Hezb-e Islami, who oppose changes to the electoral bodies and insist on elections this year, the feasibility of which is very much in doubt (see part one of our series here). This is probably a question that needs to be solved through the involvement of political parties, civil society organisations and other political figures.

 

(1) On 16 January 2018 Belal Sediqi, a member of the Selection Committee representing the AIHRC, told AAN that initially 88 potential applicants had obtained application forms from the Selection Committee’s secretariat, but only 57 candidates had submitted completed forms and other required documents. In an earlier announcement, the Committee had given a four-day deadline for applications, from 31 December 2017 to 3 January 2018 (see here). The electoral law does not specify the timeframe for applications and defers to the Selection Committee to do so, which should not take more than seven working days.

Paragraph two of article 12 of the electoral law says:
Candidates eligible under paragraph (1) of this article, shall submit their curriculum vitae, educational documents and citizenship Tazkera to the selection committee within the timeframe determined by the mentioned committee.

This timeframe cannot take more than seven working days.

(2) Article 16 of the electoral law:

1     A member of the Commission can be terminated from job in the following circumstances:

1.1-     Faking of the educational documents.

1.2-     Deprivation of civil rights on the order of a competent court.

1.3-     Conviction for committing crimes of misdemeanor or felony.

1.4-     Having membership in political parties during membership of the Commission.

1.5-     Breaching provisions of the Constitution of Afghanistan, this law and other laws enforced in the country.

1.6-     Suffering from an incurable or long-lasting disease which impedes performance of duties.

1.7-     Continuous absence from job for more than twenty days without justifiable legal reasons.

1.8-     Non-observance of provisions of Article 17 of this law.

2     Member of the Commission may tender his/her resignation in written to the president.

3     In case of resignation, termination or death of one or more members of the Commission, the President, within seven days, shall appoint new member (s) from amongst the remaining candidates stipulated in paragraph (2) of the Article (14) of this law; with due consideration to the ethnic and gender composition.

(3) Article 14 of the electoral law reads:

• The selection committee will examine the documents mentioned in paragraph (2) of the article 12 of this law, and in case of any suspicion for the sake of ensuring its accuracy, refer them to the relevant authorities. The relevant authorities are obliged to provide complete information within three working days.

In case the suspicion is proved, the provider of the document shall be referred to the legal and judicial authorities.

• From among the candidates, the selection committee shall introduce 21 persons to the president that meet the highest and most appropriate legal standards, while taking into consideration the ethnic and gender composition.
• From among the candidates mentioned in paragraph (2) of this article, the president shall appoint members of the Commission, while respecting the ethnic and gender composition, having at least two female members for the first round, in the following order:
• Four members for a period of five years.
• Three members for a period of 3 years.
• Members of the Commission in the following terms shall be appointed for a period of five years.
• Meetings of the selection committee shall take place in an open manner in accordance to a separate procedure, to be adopted by its members.

(4) Those who signed the statement included FEFA, ADDO (Afghanistan Democracy and Development Organisation), Afghanistan Youths Social and Educational Organisation, Election and Transparency Watch Organisation of Afghanistan (ETWA), FETWO, FLOW and IDEA. On 8 January 2018, another group of civil society networks and organisations led by the Transparent Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA) held a press conference and consequently issued a statement regarding the Selection Committee and the general situation regarding the elections, calling on the president to dissolve the on-going selection committee process, which, it said, was illegal and should adhere to article 16 of the electoral law. It also said that the government’s interference in the working affairs of civil society was “a big blow to democracy and rule of law,” which needed to be avoided. They were referring to the appointment of Safi as representative of civil society organisations to the Selection Committee.

The signatories on the statement included: TEFA, Afghanistan Peace House, Afghan Civil Society Elections Network (ACSEN), Watch on Basic Rights of Afghanistan, Training Human Rights Association, Women Coordination Network, Civil Society Joint Working Group, Women and Children Legal Research Foundation (WCLRF), Afghanistan Youths Social and Educational Organisation, FRD, Election and Transparency Watch Organisation of Afghanistan (ETWA), and Civil Society Development and Growth Organisation.

(5) Article 13 of the electoral law reads:

• 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:
• 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.
• One member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, as elected by that commission as the member.
• One member of the Independent Commission of Oversight of Implementation of the Constitution of Afghanistan, as elected by that commission, as the member.
• Elected representative of the civil society organizations related to elections, as member.
• Elected representative of the civil society organizations advocating for the women rights, as member.
• Civil society organizations mentioned in sections (4 and 5) of the paragraph (1) of this article are obliged to introduce their representatives for the membership of the selection committee within seven working days of the date of notification. Otherwise, members stated in sections (1,2 and 3) of the paragraph (1) of this article will introduce 3 persons each from the organizations mentioned in sections (4 and 5) of the paragraph (1) of this article to the president; and the president will appoint two persons representing the two organizations as the members of the selection committee.

(6) Article 15 of the electoral law states:

Before occupying their position, members of the Commission shall take the following oath, in the presence of the President, administered by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court:

“I swear to Allah the Great to perform, as member of the Independent Election Commission, all assigned duties honestly, with integrity, independently, fully impartially and neutrally in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution of Afghanistan this law, and other laws of the country.

(7) On 27 November 2016, the IEC elected Najibullah Ahmadzai as its chairman, Wasima Badghisi as the deputy for operations, Abdul Qader Quraishi as deputy for finance and administrative affairs, and Gula Jan Badi Sayyad as secretary and spokesman. (See AAN’s report for the members’ biographies here). According to paragraph two of article 11 of the electoral law, the chairperson is elected for a period of two years and six months, and the deputies and secretary (spokesperson) for a period of one year.

Article 11 of the electoral law states:

• For the purpose of administration and supervision of every kind of elections and referral to the general public opinion in the country, the Commission comprised of seven members is established in accordance to this law:
• The Commission shall have a Chairperson, Deputy (Operations), Deputy (Admin and Finance) and a Secretary (Spokesperson) that are elected from among the members of the Commission by themselves through free, secret, and direct elections in the following manner:
• Chairperson of the Commission, for a period of two years and six months.
• Deputies and secretary (spokesperson) of the Commission for a period of one year.
• Chairperson, Deputies and Secretary of the Commission may nominate themselves for the next rounds as well.
• Scope of duties and authorities of the deputies and secretary (spokesperson) shall be determined in the internal regulation to be adopted by the Commission.

(8) The IEC has indeed announced vacancies for various posts, including for the positions of 24 provincial electoral officers; and deputy head of the secretariat and seven heads of IEC departments. This is important, as, without these staff, the IEC cannot implement voter registration, which is another highly crucial step in preparation for the next elections. On 28 November 2017 the IEC announced that it planned to recruit 24 people for the positions of provincial electoral officers through open competition, which included Kabul, Maidan Wardak, Sar-e Pul, Khost, Jawzjan, Panjshir, Baghlan, Zabul, Nimruz, Logar, Kunar, Faryab, Kapisa, Herat, Balkh, Helmand, Samangan, Farah, Nuristan, Badghis, Ghazni, Laghman, Paktika and Kunduz. On3 December 2018 it announced another set of vacancies, which include important positions of deputy head of secretariat for operations, chief of staff of the IEC chair, heads of departments of policy and plan, public information and outreach, foreign relations, training, legal affairs, information technology, finance and accounting. In early January 2018, the IEC announced another 55 positions of grade three to seven to be filled (see the list here). A source from the IEC told AAN that the process had been delayed due to the dismissal of the IEC’s chairman.

All of these issues have caused delays and make holding the elections on 7 July 2018 almost impossible, despite the fact that on 2 January 2018, the IEC issued a statement saying that the upcoming elections would be held on the scheduled date. It rejected the news that the IEC was considering a fall-back date as “baseless.” The statement asked the people to trust the IEC as it was taking steps, which, it said, included the completion of the polling centre assessment (this will be discussed in a separate dispatch) and sending a voter registration plan to the government.

 

 

Afghanistan’s opium-driven economy has been a thorn in side of its international backers, and a major challenge for fighting the insurgency and rebuilding a functioning state. Through the lens of the military side of counter-narcotic strategies, the United States and its international allies have pursued various counter-narcotics approaches, centred mainly on eradication and interdiction. However, none of these have resulted in fewer drugs. To the contrary, they have contributed to an expansion in the opium poppy area. The new US administration recently has decided to up the game by conducting its first ever series of air strikes against alleged Taleban drug labs. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica looks back at the US counter-narcotics policies in Afghanistan, to assess how effective this new approach might be.

On 19 and 20 November, US and Afghan forces conducted a combined 24-hour operation to strike several alleged Taleban drug labs and one so-called command-and-control node in the north of Helmand province. A press release from the Resolute Support Mission said the strikes – three in Kajaki district, four in Musa Qalah district and one in Sangin district – were successful. From videos of the strikes, it appears the operation was named “Jagged Knife” (see these two Resolute Support Facebook posts here and here).

The US forces said that the airstrikes were the first authorised use of the new approach under President Trump’s strategy in South Asia, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan, “that allow U.S. forces to actively pursue terrorist elements and attack them offensively in collaboration with Afghan forces.” In the words of General Nicholson “never before have we had the kind of trust and cooperation [with the Afghan military] that makes these types of strikes possible.” President Ashraf Ghani endorsed the new campaign (quoted here) “We’re determined to tackle criminal economy and narcotics trafficking with full force.”

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua quoted a local Afghan official who claimed that, as a result of the airstrikes, “44 drug smugglers were killed and their heroin labs completely destroyed”. The Afghan Taleban’s Voice of Jihad website reported on 20 November 2017 that ten members of a family, including children and women, had been killed in the US air strikes in Musa Qala and seven houses destroyed. They also rejected the existence of any heroin factories in Helmand (quoted here).

Neither the Afghan government, nor the US forces, reported that there had been civilian casualties in the attacks. The Resolute Support mission in its press release said that, for the first time, US Air Force F22A Raptors has been used in Afghanistan, “principally because of their ability to mitigate civilian casualties and inadvertent damage by employing small diameter bombs during U.S. airstrikes.” Nevertheless, given that the drug labs for processing the opium poppy into heroin in Afghanistan are not clearly marked stand-alone factories, but rather improvised facilities, often operated in civilian residences, it is likely that there could have been some civilian victims.

2017: A turnaround in the US policy

The US counter-narcotics approach in Afghanistan has changed dramatically since the 1980s, when it mainly involved passive observation of developments on the ground. Following the military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. stepped up their game and tried various counter-narcotics tactics, primarily centred around eradication and interdiction, as it will be explained in detail below. However, in late 2017, as a result of the new US president’s strategy for South Asia, there was a turnaround in the government’s counter-narcotics policy and, for the first time, included airstrikes against drug facilities that are linked to the insurgency, and operating without any legal limitations, as was the case before (see also this AAN analysis on Trump’s strategy on Afghanistan here and here.) Some 90 days after the announcement of the new strategy authorising US forces to “attack the enemy across the breadth and the depth of the battle space,” as the US commander on the ground, General John Nicholson put it, the US forces in Afghanistan conducted their first ever aerial bombing of heroin labs in Helmand. According to Nicholson, the new strategy also allowed the U.S. forces to attack “[the enemy’s] financial networks and revenue streams.”

At a subsequent press conference, Nicholson announced that the strikes were “just the beginning.” He said:

To give you a sense of scale, in Afghanistan, there’s an estimated — you know, the Drug Enforcement Agency would estimate there’s anywhere between 400 and 500 drug labs active at any given time. So, last night, we took about 10 of those out — off the battlefield in one night.

Nicholson military strategy is to hit the Taleban “where it hurts,” i.e. their finances. According to a Resolute Support estimate, published on 30 November 2017, the Afghan and US operations against Taleban heroin labs on 19 November have caused financial damage to the Taleban of 11 million USD.

This aggressive US counter-narcotics strategy could indicate that interdictions, i.e. raids against drug traffickers with links to insurgency that the US favoured until 2014, have been elevated to aerial bombing. This may be happening simply because the latter requires less personnel (the US do not have enough ground troops for raids and interdiction anymore). It may also be that such attacks generate more media coverage. There is a fear now that, in future, the air strikes could be used as the primary counter-narcotics measure in Afghanistan, given that the number of US Air Force attacks increased significantly in the last year. (1) However, there is no guarantee that the new, more remotely controlled method will be any the more successful. Almost certainly, it will be deadlier, as UNAMA findings show about the growing number of civilian casualties caused by the air war (AAN analysis here).

A look back: US counter-narcotic policies 1979- 2017

The dawn of Afghanistan’s drug industry

The beginning of Afghanistan opium industry dates back to the anti-Soviet jihad of 1979 (see here and here and here). Between 1979 and 1989 the mujahedin fighters used profits from the opium trade to buy weapons for their war against the Soviets. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the different warring mujahedin factions encouraged the continuation of opium cultivation in their respective fiefdoms to finance their micro-conflicts, which resulted in the factional wars in the 1990s.

When the Taleban took power in 1996, they lacked any substantial international financial support, as their regime was not recognised, they exploited the opium production as a source of tax revenue. The opposing force, the Northern Alliance, continued using drug profits to maintain their power base and position (see here). Although, the Taleban, in order to please the UN and attract aid for the country, banned opium cultivation in their final year in power in 2001, Afghan opium production between 1979 and 2002 had increased more than 15-fold. Afghanistan became the world’s largest producer, accounting for almost three-quarters of global opium production (see here).

During the 1980s and 1990s, a US counter-narcotic policy in Afghanistan was almost non-existent. Although the CIA was arming and supporting the mujahedin fighters, it kept a blind eye on their involvement in the drugs trafficking. According to a forthcoming book by Alfred W McCoy, titled “In the Shadows of the American Century” (reviewed here), the State Department did report on drugs. For example, in the late 1980s, it acknowledged that resistance elements took up opium production and trafficking “to provide staples for [the] population under their control and to fund weapons purchases”. McCoy also quoted Charles Cogan, a former director of the CIA’s Afghan operation, who, in 1995, explained the agency’s choice: “There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”

US stepping up the game: 2002 – 2009

At the beginning of the international intervention in Afghanistan the policy on paper, as well as the action in the field of counter-narcotics, was vague. This was true both for the civilian and the military actors. The best example on policy is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 1401 from March 2002. This provided the mandate to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) (2) that mentioned “the vital importance of combating the cultivation and trafficking of illicit drugs”. This only appeared in its preamble clauses that meant that no concrete policy was spelled out in the main text.

On the ground, the US and allied military forces played a politically sensitive game in order not to upset their Afghan military allies – “the war entrepreneurs of the former Northern Alliance [who] integrated themselves into the emerging political system under the guise of legitimate politicians,” as German analyst Citha D. Maass put it in a report translated by AAN. The US, with only 9,700 troops on the ground by the end of 2002 (see here), took a hands-off approach to the drug problem in Afghanistan. They focused on working with former warlords (who were involved in the drugs business) to fight al-Qaeda and the Taleban (see here). It should be noted that the US, the UN and the United Kingdom counter-narcotics efforts also included institution building, such as the new Ministry of Counter-narcotics, the Counter-narcotics police of Afghanistan, the Criminal Justice Task Force, amongst other initiatives such as the Alternative Livelihoods programmes. However, this analysis is only concerned with the military side of counter-narcotic strategies.

As part of the 2002 Bonn Agreement, the UK initially assumed the role of the international community’s “lead nation” for the counter-narcotics support (Germany led on police reform; Italy on justice reform; and the US on creating new Afghan military forces), during the period of the transitional government in Afghanistan. The UK’s counter-narcotics policy followed the same political considerations as the US’s and was built around a programme for promoting compensated eradication. The government in London would pay 350 US dollars to farmers for each jerib (0.2 hectare) of poppy they themselves eradicated; a programme for which 71.75 million USD had been committed. In 2002, UK forces were concentrated in Kabul, with 1,700 soldiers working alongside other allied units; see here.

The UN also backed and facilitated this initiative. It stressed in its 2003 UNSC Resolution on Afghanistan that “recovery or reconstruction assistance ought to be provided […] where local authorities demonstrate a commitment to maintaining a secure environment, respecting human rights and countering narcotics.” The policy, nevertheless, was aborted after less than a year because it was plagued by numerous problems, including corruption. This programme mainly focussed on Nangrahar. At that stage, this was one of the largest poppy-producing provinces and UK troops had not as yet arrived in Helmand; the largest producer province. Also, local poppy-substitution initiatives elsewhere faced difficulties in attracting British support. (3)

By 2004, the policy refocused on interdiction. This was not very successful nor did it have a desired impact, because intelligence was often flawed or provided by Afghan allies to settle personal scores.

In January 2006, when the Afghanistan Compact, the key political agreement between the international community and the government of Afghanistan, came into force, the UK moved to be the lead nation on counter-narcotics. As in all other sectors, Afghanistan took over, at least nominally, to reflect that, from now on, policies and implementation would be ‘Afghan-led’. (4)

The US had already become critical of the UK counter-narcotics action as early as 2004, mainly because it found the approach to eradication “overly restrictive.” US journalist James Risen describes in his book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” (pp 152-62) what probably was the only, or one of the few, airstrikes against drug-related targets since 9/11. (A British Special Forces team had called in a US air strike against a drug lab, but it is unclear if US commanders even knew what the target was.) Risen further quotes Robert B. Charles, Assistant Secretary for the State Department’s International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), as saying: “We had regular reports of where the labs were. There were not large numbers of them. We could have destroyed all the labs and warehouses in the three primary provinces involved in drug trafficking… in a week.” (See also Charles’s testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, entitled “Afghanistan: Are the British Counter Narcotics Efforts Going Wobbly”).

In 2005, the US developed its first own counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan and allotted over two billion USD “to stem the production, consumption and trafficking of illicit drugs in the country through elimination/eradication, interdiction, justice reform, public information, and drug demand reduction.”

However, this came too late, because Afghanistan’s drug economy had been consolidated already by 2005, mainly by “the new breed of ‘warlord politicians’ who occupied powerful positions, while remaining actively involved in the illicit economy,” as Maass pointed out. The potential gross value of the opiate economy in that period was equivalent to almost half of Afghanistan’s total licit GDP (see this AAN analysis).

Between 2003 and 2009, US counter-narcotic policies had mainly focused on eradication and interdiction efforts (see here, and here).

These policies, according to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at Brookings, had severe negative effects on the overall US combat mission in Afghanistan as they had alienated the local population (who saw themselves as its main target and also as, temporarily, there was no compensation issued for eradicated poppy) from the national government, as well as from local tribal elites or local administration when they had agreed to eradication. Together, these effects motivated some people to support the Taleban or to withdraw cooperation with the international and Afghan troops and government (see here).

William Byrd’s 2008 paper on Afghanistan’s opium economy challenge draws a similar conclusion. He wrote that the Government’s anti- drugs campaign in 2004/05 “which achieved by far its greatest success in Nangarhar Province, also carried significant political costs for the Government, especially in that province” in the form of what he called “a political reaction, which in the Afghanistan context can be exploited by anti-government interests and by the drug industry itself.”

An insightful read on why the US eradication efforts failed is also offered in the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee report from August 2009. The report pointed to social injustice, showing that DynCorp International, a major US Government contractor, “has been paid 35 million to 45 million USD a year to supervise manual eradication efforts most often carried out by Afghans paid a few dollars a day.” (5)

Interdiction efforts, including the destruction of heroin processing facilities in night raids undertaken between 2003 and 2009 also failed to generate the desired effects. Since 2009, the interdiction efforts included ‘kill or capture’ missions. This tactic was heavily flawed given the entrenched corruption and favouritism in the counter-narcotics police forces, as Felbab-Brown pointed out in her testimony before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control held in October 2009. There she stated that these efforts have been “manipulated to eliminate drug competition and ethnic and tribal rivals.” She added, “operations were largely conducted against small vulnerable traders who could neither sufficiently bribe nor adequately intimidate the interdiction teams and their supervisors within the Afghan government.” Byrd highlighted another aspect; namely that “cases have been reported of drug traders being arrested, but then released in return for a payment,” adding that there had been cases of “their drug shipments being confiscated, not for destruction, but for onward sale by corrupt local authorities, including the possibility of returning part of the shipment to the trader concerned for an additional payment.” (See also this AAN analysis here)

2009: disagreement in NATO and the US modification in policy

A change in the general diplomatic discourse was already noticeable in 2007; a year that also marked a historical record in opium cultivation levels with 193,000 hectares planted with opium poppy; a figure only topped in 2013, 2014 and 2017. (6) For example, in the preamble clauses of the UNSC 2007 Resolution, concerns were expressed over the links between terrorism and illicit drugs. This also meant that for the first time UN mentioned counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics in the same breath. The US military had been using that line since 2004. It also meant that the UN adopted the US position of a drugs economy controlled by the insurgents, although it had had a more balanced stance before.

A year later, in October 2008, as a US initiative, it was agreed at the meeting of NATO defence ministers that NATO soldiers in Afghanistan could attack opium traffickers. The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report from August 2009 stated that the authorisation for using lethal force on traffickers, which came in early 2009, “caused a stir at NATO”, because “some [member-]countries questioned whether the killing traffickers and destroying drug labs complied with international law.” Germany, in particular, refused to follow this approach, while the UK, for example, was prepared to back it. Each kill-or-capture mission was to be signed off by military lawyers “who will need to be satisfied that a drug smuggler is clearly linked to the insurgency,” the Guardian reported at the time. As a result, this policy was not long-lived and very few, if any, such missions were carried out. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Secretary General of NATO at the time, the US Senate report said, ensured that “filters had been put in place to make sure the alliance remains within the bounds of the law.”

The 2009 policy modification, which came with Obama’s administration new counter-narcotics strategy, dropped eradication and centred on increased interdiction. This primarily targeted Taleban-linked traffickers, and a rural development strategy as a means to help farmers to identify what alternative crops could be grown and where (see here and here). The US also developed an agriculture strategy for Afghanistan, for the first time, which foresaw deployment of 450 additional civilian officers to oversee its implementation.

This change was also reflected in the 2009 UNSC Resolution on Afghanistan, which, for the first time, called upon ISAF and Operation Enduring Freedom “to continue to address the threat to the security and stability of Afghanistan posed by the Taleban, al-Qaida, illegally armed groups, criminals and those involved in the narcotics trade.” [italics by AAN]

However, these tactics also have not been successful. As noted by Felbab-Brown again. After hundreds of interdiction raids were conducted in 2009, especially in southern Afghanistan, these had almost no effect on the Taleban’s resource flows. (7) She further elaborated that even at the height of the US military surge in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2012, “the cumulative effects of the narcotics interdiction effort to suppress the Taleban financial flows did not affect their activities and sustainability at the strategic level.” This policy also neglected the point that the larger part of the Afghan drugs economy was not controlled by the insurgents. “Moreover, the strategy of using night raids and house searches to both capture ‘high-value’ targets (whatever that exactly means) and search for drugs and explosives blurred the distinction between farmers and ‘high-value’ drug traffickers and Taleban operatives,” Felbab-Brown pointed out.

As John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, put it in his testimony before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control in January 2014:

Since 2002, the U.S. counter narcotics effort has evolved from one that emphasized eradicating poppy fields and interdicting drugs, to one more closely aligned with the overall U.S. counter-insurgency strategy [… o]n my last trip to Afghanistan, no one at the Embassy could convincingly explain to me how the U.S. government counter narcotics efforts are making a meaningful impact on the narcotics trade or how they will have a significant impact after the 2014 transition.

That this is correct is supported by the statistics: between 2009 and 2014, Afghanistan managed to add to its opium cultivation scorecard two more record years. In 2013, an estimated 209,000 hectares were planted with opium poppy, and in 2014 224,000 hectares.

Opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, 1994 – 2017 (hectares). Source: UNODC, Annual Opium Survey 2017

Following the Afghan presidential elections of 2014 and the withdrawal of most US combat forces in December of that year, the counter-narcotic efforts seemed to enter into a lull. President Ghani appointed a female law professor of Uzbek ethnicity, Salamat Azimi, as the Minister of counter-narcotics in April 2015. This political appointment was meant to gratify the coalition with Abdul Rashid Dostum, the first vice president and the leader of Jombesh-e Melli political party. Azemi, who comes from a university background and had never held a ministerial position before, was a weak candidate, for what some refer to as “the toughest job in world.”

There was almost no eradication under Azemi’s tenure, as the UNODC annual opium surveys published between 2015 and 2017 indicate. This is understandable, given that eradication had become an effort led by the provincial governors. It required considerable personal engagement and stature on the part of the minister to convince some governors to undertake it. (For a discussion of the hurdles woman in Afghan politics still face, see this recent New York Times article) An official from the Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) told AAN in 2016 that, in the first year of her tenure, Azemi only travelled to Bamiyan (in early 2016), a province that had not seen any poppy cultivation since 2005, to open a new wing of the city’s university. President Ghani, who is known for his tendency to micro-manage, also did not make eradication a priority. The change of administration in the US in 2016/17 also contributed to a lack of a clear policy and, in general, pushed counter-narcotic objectives to being secondary.

Counter-narcotics at which cost?

The US and its allies, as explained above, have tried a variety of approaches to counter the expansion of drug industry in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2017. This has included the latest airstrikes against drug processing facilities under the Trump’s administration new US strategy for South Asia. Apart from humanitarian and ‘technical’ considerations, the main shortcoming was, and still is, that the approach is at least blinkered, if not ‘blind in one eye’. It targets the insurgency and leaves other actors profiting from it, given that they are considered allies in the anti-insurgency campaign.

Central indicators also prove that these approaches have been counter-productive and have produced the opposite outcomes from those intended. The attempts at eradication have resulted in more acreage being planted and, subsequently, more opium paste being produced. Meanwhile, tactics for intense interdiction have resulted in the consolidation of the drug industry. Allies, such as warlords, commanders and other actors in this drugs business, have often been able to use their access to the US forces to manipulate the campaign and redirect these efforts in order to eliminate their competition.

As intelligence obtained from Afghan allies, among other sources, undoubtedly will continue to be key to the ‘new’ approach, why would then airstrikes make a difference?

 

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Sari Kouvo

 

(1) According to a Washington Post article from November 2017 “the Air Force had dropped 2,901 weapons in Afghanistan in 2017 through to the end of September, up from 1,337 in all of 2016 and 947 in all of 2015.”

(2) The UNAMA mandate is reviewed annually, with the latest renewal on 17 March 2017 when the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2344 (2017).

(3) In 2003, the Mangal tribe in Paktia and Khost province approached the local UNAMA office after it had heard about the British compensation programme and had taken a decision through its Central Shura (since then collapsed) to ban all poppy cultivation. The UNAMA office in Gardez and the UN agencies were able to verify that this had indeed been implemented almost completely, but requests for funding remained unheard. (AAN colleague Thomas Ruttig then headed this UNAMA office. About some fallout, read this AAN analysis.)

(4) For UK counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan post 2006 see this blog entry by David Mansfield, a leading UK expert on Afghan drugs.

(5) See also in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee report from August 2009 on the aerial spraying debates in the period from 2001 to 2008 (p 7):

The most effective method for widespread eradication is widely understood to be aerial spraying, the technique used to eliminate huge portions of Colombia’s coca crop. Crop dusters can drop herbicides on vast fields in a short time, outside the range of insurgent fire. But the Afghan Government, Britain and other countries opposed aerial spraying for a variety of reasons. Explaining the benefits and safety of spraying would be difficult in a country with a literacy rate of only 28 percent. More significantly, the tactic would give the Taliban a dynamic propaganda victory. ‘‘If we began aerial spraying of poppy crops, every birth defect in Afghanistan would be blamed on the United States,’’ said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. ‘‘Afghans also still remember that the Russians dropped small bombs disguised as toys. Every time a child picked one up, death and destruction resulted. The general belief is that bad things come from planes.’’

Others offer a more sinister interpretation of the refusal of Afghan officials to allow aerial spraying. In 2004 and 2005, Charles and other State Department counter-narcotics officials thought that they had reached an agreement among a large number of influential clerics and tribal leaders in southern Afghanistan to support aerial spraying. President Karzai agreed tentatively to a pilot project. But the Afghan cabinet rejected the idea outright, banning all forms of aerial spraying. ‘‘Some of them were protecting the source of their own wealth,’’ said Charles in the recent interview.

(6) The metric unit of hectares under opium cultivation is used here as an indicator, because it shows the increase in area under the opium poppy cultivation. This implies, that socio-political conditions country-wide and lack of rule of law allowed more poppy to be planted. It also shows that considerable number of farmers were prepared to risk (or were aware that there was no risk) and, thus, allotted more land for opium poppy.

(7) See also in the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee report from August 2009 a section titled “A Metaphor for War – The battle of Marjah”, which offers a detailed account of the three-day attack that started on 19 May 2009 in Marjah village in Helmand province. After three days of intense fighting, the report says, “about 60 militants lay dead and coalition forces had seized roughly 100 tons of heroin, hashish, opium paste, poppy seeds and precursor chemicals used to turn opium into heroin.” (pp 18-21)

The lower house of the Afghan Parliament – the Wolesi Jirga – has a long-standing and unflattering reputation for corruption, which ranges from members of parliament receiving bribes for votes of confidence to arranging lucrative contracts. The latest allegation, however, was the first time that an MP had accused a fellow MP of corruption. This eventually led to an investigation by a parliamentary fact-finding commission and a referral of the case to the Attorney General, but only after most MPs had tried to give the accused immunity from prosecution. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Rohullah Sorush (with input by Thomas Ruttig) present a timeline of developments and examine the details of this case and its significance for Afghanistan’s parliament.

Since 2005, when it was elected for the first time after a 36-year break, (1) the Wolesi Jirga has seen only one rotation of MPs, in 2010. The third post-Taleban parliamentary election should have been held in 2015 according to Afghan law, but it has been postponed several times since then (see AAN’s analyses on the delays here  and on the legality of the extended mandate of MPs here). It is against this backdrop that some MPs, who have been sharing benches with each other for almost seven and a half years now, decided to expose corruption within their own ranks. While their ulterior motives remain unclear, this exposure may have to do with their positioning for the new parliamentary elections scheduled for 2018. In this context, they may want to ride on the wave of ongoing anti-corruption efforts driven by President Ashraf Ghani.

An MP goes public

On 22 July 2017, Homayun Homayun, an MP from Khost province and deputy speaker of the Wolesi Jirga, for the first time named a name – although not of an MP. At a press conference held in the parliament building, he publicly accused the head of the house’s Secretariat (dar ul-ensha), Khudai Nazar Nasrat, of corruption and making illegal appointments (see an Afghan media report here). (The Secretariat consists of support staff who are in charge of all the administrative, financial, logistical and security affairs of the Wolesi Jirga.) (2) Homayun alleged that around 350 to 400 staff had illegally been employed under Nasrat’s watch and that money for contracts had been embezzled. (3) Homayun’s accusations also appeared to be directed at Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi, the Wolesi Jirga’s speaker, as Nasrat had risen to top positions in the Secretariat following Ibrahimi’s election to his own post in February 2011. (4) Homayun also explicitly said at the press conference that “the administrative board of the house may also be involved in some corruption cases.” (Homayun, as the first deputy speaker, is one of five MPs who serve as the Wolesi Jirga’s Administrative board; see also footnote 2.)

Before going public, Homayun had requested in writing that the Attorney General investigate these allegations. This official letter, dated 14 July 2017 and numbered 137/125 (as detailed by an Afghan online media source, Khabarnama, owned by the brother of another MP, in Dari here), described cases of Nasrat’s misuse, such as recruitment of more than 300 temporary staff, most of whom, according to Homayun, never existed. (The Secretariat can hire its own staff and MPs do not have a say in who is employed.) Homayun also accused Nasrat of extortion, non-transparent contracts, illegal payments and excessive expenses for MPs’ trips to foreign countries. According to the undated report Homayun presented to the Wolesi Jirga in late September, the documents had also been sent to the president via the Ministry for Parliamentary Affairs. In early September, Homayun told Khabarnama that “the prosecutor’s office has not yet responded to the request.”

According to Homayun’s report, his initial information apparently originated from fellow southeastern MP Abdul Qader Zazai Watandost, the Wolesi Jirga’s secretary. (Both Zazai and Homayun were elected to the administrative board of the Wolesi Jirga in March 2017, in contrast to speaker Ibrahimi who has been on the board since 2011.) When Zazai tried to probe Nasrat about the documents, Nasrat refused, claiming he reports only to the speaker. Homayun assigned  Zazai to assess all documents in the Secretariat (decision number 77/79, dated 10 June 2017; see also this Pajhwok report in Dari), but he was blocked by Nasrat. Zazai also said, according to Homayun’s report, that the speaker of the house had called him to his office and told him to back off. Some days later, according to the same report, in a meeting of the Wolesi Jirga’s Administrative Board, Ibrahimi had allegedly requested that Homayun not disclose the documents so that the parliament’s dignity be preserved; at the same time, he assured him of his support if “there is more corruption in the Secretariat of the Lower House.”

While Homayun surely has his own motives for exposing corruption at the core of the institutions that are designed to facilitate parliament’s work (more on this below), the counter-offensive followed shortly afterwards. Only a few days later, on 25 July 2017, speaker Ibrahimi sent a letter to the Attorney General’s Office (AGO), which AAN has been shown, stating that Homayun’s allegations were not credible and did not need to be investigated. Nasrat had, in fact, previously alleged that there had been personal goals behind Homayun’s accusations, namely that Homayun had pushed him to fire the Secretariat’s financial director in order to take control of some contracts himself, namely over stationery (5) and over the house’s own media channel through an outlet that belonged to him. Nasrat had reportedly even warned Homayun against making the issue public.

The lower house’s speaker comes under fire

Two months later, the Wolesi Jirga speaker came directly under fire. On 22 September 2017, Tolo TV showed documents (without giving a source for them) that implied that not only Nasrat, but Ibrahimi was involved in embezzlement. The media report claimed that 50 million Afghanis (approximately 725,000 USD) had been taken from the Wolesi Jirga’s budget to pay the rent for the speaker’s house, guest house and office in the last five years. In his report, Homayun even claimed the houses that were said to be in Kart-e Parwan did not exist, even though a monthly rent of 765,000 Afghanis (11,000 USD) had been paid out of the Wolesi Jirga budget over the past five years and that bills for repair works had also been taken out of the same budget.

Ibrahimi and Nasrat later rejected these allegations in parliament. Ibrahimi claimed that the speakers of both houses, as well as the Attorney General and the Chief Justice were entitled to have houses rented by the government. Nasrat, who was also given the floor, said that the Secretariat released the payments for the speaker’s rented house in accordance with the law under Code 91 of government policy. As it later turned out, neither side was fully correct.

Why did Homayun expose corruption?

Homayun’s motives for exposing corruption in the Wolesi Jirga remain the key to understanding this affair. According to two MPs who spoke to AAN on condition of anonymity, his relationship with President Ghani is crucial to this equation. (AAN tried several times to arrange a meeting with Homayun, but he was either travelling or said he was too busy to meet.)

Homayun was born in 1974 and finished school in the Soviet Union (his father was Kabul police chief during Nur Muhammad Taraki’s Moscow-backed government in 1978/79). Some MPs refer to him as “Homayun Khalqi Homayun,” Khalq being the name of the wing of the the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) which ruled Afghanistan from 1978 to 1979. Homayun, the son, is not known as a member of any of the current PDPA successor parties, or even as sharing their political outlook. He runs a construction business, a profession favoured by many MPs whose position gives them access to lucrative contracts via political connections. (This field, however, was put under tighter control when President Ghani established the National Procurement Authority which is directly under his own office.) Homayun became the chair of the Wolesi Jirga’s Defense and Territorial Affairs Commission in 2012 (see here).

Sources from southeastern Afghanistan told AAN that before the 2014 election, Homayun was not a widely known figure in his home province. In its run-up, he had hired some vehicles and a group of armed people, helping to project himself as well-connected and influential. That made him stand out in a region that is still not used to such behaviour and helped him to get enlisted into Ghani’s presidential campaign, which mobilised heavily in the southeast (AAN analysis here). In parliament, he leads the Afghanistan-e Azad (Free Afghanistan) parliamentary group, established in December 2015 (6).

One of the MPs, who spoke to AAN anonymously about the affair said that problems have since emerged between Homayun and the president:

The problem between President Ghani and Homayun Homayun started after Ghani took power. Homayun says he voted for President Ghani and helped him a lot to get into power [meaning gathering votes for him]. Homayun’s expectations from the president were very high. He wanted to get money from the president and [believed that] ministers should be hired according to his recommendations, but President Ghani will not do that.

Homayun’s fellow countryman from Khost, Latif Rohani, who is a member of the High Peace Council (and also son of Mawlawi Pir Mohammad Rohani, a Taleban-era chancellor of Kabul University who left the movement after 2001), said that Homayun’s problems with the president had arisen over an expected payback for his election support: “Homayun says the president does not pay attention to Khost development, and that he has not accepted his suggestions on this.” Homayun appears to have miscalculated that the Karzai-era patronage system – which awarded support in elections with positions, influence or contracts – would continue unabatedly under the new president.

Humayun seemed to be still enjoying the president camp’s support when he sucessfully ran for the post of the Wolesi Jirga’s deputy speaker in March 2017. However, in July 2017, he switched political sides and started openly supporting the anti-Ghani ‘Ankara coalition’, saying that its emergence was “testimony to President Ashraf Ghani’s poor leadership skills,” given that the coalition’s leaders were “serving government officials.” (For background on the Ankara Coalition, or as it is officially named, the Coalition for the Salvation of Afghanistan, see AAN analysis here). Homayun reportedly joined the coalition at a meeting held in Istanbul in late October 2017 and, with a number of other opposition MPs, most recently attended another meeting by the group held on 2 December 2017 in Kandahar (see also AAN analysis here). According to Rohani, Homayun is trying to mobilise other influential people from the southeast to joining the Ankara Coalition, but “he has not been very succesful so far.”

Enter the fact-finding commission

After Tolo TV published new, leaked allegations on 22 September 2017, the issue of corruption began dominating the ‘open discussion’ part of parliamentary sessions. First, on 23 September, a number of MPs raised the Tolo leak in the Wolesi Jirga plenary and requested a referral of the case to the Attorney General’s Office for investigation, as it “could negatively impact on the credibility and integrity of the House.” Concluding this discussion, Homayun, who in his position as first deputy speaker of the house had chaired the session, supported this motion. While doing so, the public broadcast of this session by the Wolesi Jirga’s own TV channel was suddenly discontinued. (7)

Two days later, on 25 September, Homayun again chaired a session (although there was no quorum) and, in his concluding remarks, informed MPs that a commission would be assigned to investigate the possible involvement of the Wolesi Jirga’s speaker and the head of the Secretariat in corruption. There was no follow-up, though, and in the next session, on 30 September, Homayun accused Ibrahimi of non-cooperation. Then, finally, the House established a five-member investigatory commission. (8)

Procrastination and…

On 2 October 2017, Ibrahimi changed his story and openly and publicly confirmed that corruption did exist in the Wolesi Jirga. However, he still he did not appear too keen on having an investigation. The to-and-fro between him and Homayun continued for another month while a division in the house between different blocks of MPs also became more apparent.

Already in the session on 27 September, Uruzgan MP Obaidullah Barakzai had blamed Homayun for misusing his position to attack the Wolesi Jirga speaker for his own political purposes, without going into detail. Another MP, representative for Kabul Ramazan Bashardost who is known for his strong anti-corruption stance was stopped by MP Zazai Watandost, member of the parliament’s administrative board, when he wanted to raise the issue of corruption (see media report here). Zazai, who had initially exposed corruption in the Secretariat to Homayun, now argued that discussing this issue further “was not beneficial for the country.”

On 9 October, Homayun lashed out at Ibrahimi in the plenary, accusing him of interfering in the investigation “against the decision of the House” and misusing his authority by adding a commissioner and assigning Zazai, the secretary of the Administrative Board, as chair. Ibrahimi replied that he had done so with the consensus of the Administrative Board. The fact that Homayun who is on the Administrative Board, questioned attempted changes to the fact-finding commission, indicates that Ibrahimi might have tried to overrule or circumvent him.

…illegal counter-action

A week later, on 16 October 2017, some MPs were critical that the investigation had still not begun. Most MPs were by then of the view that the speaker’s assigning of an additional commissioner was against the decision of the house. In other words, they backed Homayun’s position. Other MPs told the speaker and his first deputy not to make it a personal issue and act in accordance with the law and the Wolesi Jirga’s internal procedures. They urged them to expedite the investigation so that the commission could report back to the house. The house, though, remained divided on how many commissioners there should be, and it was finally decided to put this to another vote in the plenary. However, there was no quorum on the day and no vote took place. For various, unfolding reasons, no vote was ever taken on this. (For more on the perennial failure of MPs to turn up to work and form quorums, see AAN analysis here).

Homayun and his supporters, at this point, lost patience with the endless procrastination and decided to take action, but by illegal means – and this was captured on a video obtained and also released by Tolo. The footage shows Homayun and MP Lalai Hamidzai, from Kandahar, entering the Wolesi Jirga TV’s archives on 17 October 2017 and copying some material (it is not clear with what aim). The footage also shows Hamidzai paying two men – believed to be archive employees – to let them in. Homayun eventually confirmed that they entered the archives, though he denied that they forced their way in or that they paid bribes to archives employees.

The culmination to all the drama came in the session on 25 October. When Paktia MP Gul Padshah Majidi brought up Homayun and Hamidzai’s forceful entering of the Wolesi Jirga  TV’s archives, the situation escalated into a shower of verbal abuse and attempted assault by Uruzgan MP Obaidullah Barakzai on Homayun. The speaker had no choice but to adjourn the session.

The commission’s findings …

On 5 November 2017, the commission presented its findings and recommendations to the Wolesi Jirga. The MPs decided not to make the findings public and commission chair Erfanullah Erfan justified this with the need “to protect the dignity of the parliament.” By contrast, they agreed to publish the commission’s recommendations. However, the full report including the findings was leaked to Khabarnama.

The main findings in Ibrahimi’s case, according to the leaked document, proved that three of Homayun’s allegations were incorrect. The contract for the houses had been appoved by the President Ghani, although according to the principles of the internal duties of the Wolesi Jirga, the head of the parliament is not entitled to a rental subsidy from the budget of the parliament. The commission further found that the houses exist, but did not match their descriptions in the contract. It also found that the amount paid for repairs had been deducted from the rent – as was proper. The only allegation in Ibrahimi’s case that proved to be true, was that he unlawfully spent 5.4 million Afghanis (around 78,000 USD) from the Wolesi Jirga’s budget to purchase some carpets, furniture, electrical appliances, security devices and home appliances for his houses.

The commission thus recommended that the speaker reimburse only the money he unlawfully spent on furnishing his house and guesthouse, and Ibrahimi was ordered to pay back 5.4 million Afghanis. (Ibrahimi eventually agreed to pay back the requested amount.)

The commission also recommended that Nasrat be suspended from his position as head of the Secretariat and his case be handed over to the Attorney General for an investigation into illegal appointments of staff and corruption in procuring goods and services.

Kabul MP Hafiz Mansur, one of the commissioners, later leaked some details to the Kabul daily, Etilaat Roz:

We went to check the purchased items, the invoices and the prices. We found some invoices were fake and some were real. Some prices mentioned in the invoices differed from the prices in the bazaar. We said what needed to be said. We decided to send the investigation and our report to the AGO [Attorney General’s Office]. But I can only say that there were 14 cases that involved the Speaker of the House, the head of Secretariat of the House, the head of the Wolesi Jirga TV and also Mr Homayun Homayun.

Homayun was suspended for ten days from the Wolesi Jirga and Lalai Hamidzai for 15 days for illegally entering the Wolesi Jirga TV’s archives, while Uruzgan MP Obaidullah Barakzai was suspended for ten days for his attampted assault on the first deputy speaker. Furthermore, the acting director of Wolesi Jirga television was suspended. The fact-finding commission also recommended that she be referred to the Attorney General’s Office for interrupting the broadcast during the plenary session, but that did not happen because the Attorney General does not deal with such cases.

… and the subsequent vote which was then overruled

The whole affair had almost blown over when, on 11 November 2017, based on the petition of 70 MPs, the speaker put to a vote a motion requesting that Nasrat’s corruption case not be referred to the Attorney General’s Office for further investigation. Despite opposition to holding the vote at all, 117 of the 119 MPs present (a quorum) voted in favour of the speaker’s proposal not to refer Nasrat to the Attorney General.

This decision resulted in Erfanullah Erfan, the head of the fact-finding commission, and another MP, Muhammad Abdu from Balkh, walking out of the session because, as Tolo reported, they thought that the vote was against the law. Two days later, on 13 November, the heads of the 15 standing parliamentary commissions (see AAN analysis here) overruled the vote and decided to refer Nasrat’s case to the Attorney General.

Some reactions and the legal follow-up

The MPs’ vote to give Nasrat immunity and not send his case to the Attorney General for criminal investigation despite the recommendation of the parliament’s own fact-finding commission, provoked strong reactions from some MPs, analysts and the wider public. MP Mansur told Etilaat Roz: “Only a prosecutor and a judge can ask the parliament to remove the immunity of an MP under investigation. Then the parliament puts the issue to a vote. If the majority vote yes, the MP’s immunity will be removed and the prosecutor will have the right to investigate him/her.” Senator Zalmai Zabuli said on TV that “MPs have judged and voted on themselves, while this should have been handed over to the judicial authorities… Above all, the speaker of the parliament should be removed from his position.” Asef Ashna, a political analyst, also criticised the parliamentary vote calling for Nasrat not to be referred to the Attorney General in a programme aired on Arzo TV:

Now why is he pardoned? I expect Mr Farid Hamidy, the Attorney General, not to keep silent in such occasions, and to apply the law and restore justice.

The Attorney General finally started assessing the documents containing evidence against Nasrat in late November, Tolo reported.

Still there: the elephant in the room

Corruption in the Wolesi Jirga has been a huge problem, but rarely publically acknowledged. Reports about this have been rare – cases against MPs are tricky to prove – but those that have been published have been convincing (read various media reports here, here and here). In 2010, AAN reported how an MP described, without naming names, an attempt to bribe her and quoted other MPs, speaking off the record, who “estimated that sums of up to one and a half million dollars were paid out by some candidate ministers” before a vote of confidence (read here). (9)

The two MPs who spoke to AAN confirmed that this has not changed and that corruption in the Wolesi Jirga is still common. They maintain that MPs are still often paid by minister candidates, in some cases even by the government, to give them a vote of confidence. They estimated that only 12 to 15 per cent of the MPs are “clean” – a figure that may or may not be accurate. MPs often adjust their statements to their temporary needs, in this case to a time when it is official government policy to fight corruption and may also engage in mud-slinging against others to distract from their own corrupt practices. Even so, unless MPs are trying to protect their own backs, it is difficult to explain why (as reported above), almost all of MPs present (117 of 119) would vote to exempt the head of the Secretariat from being investigated for corruption.

Nevertheless, Homayun’s was the first case that MPs exposed the corruption of one of their fellow parliamentarians and in the Secretariat, a body which is central to the parliament’s functioning. Homayun might have been driven by his disappointment regarding the president not rewarding him for his support in the 2014 election (a complaint shared by many others) and he might have been wrong on a number of his accusations. However, the investigation he triggered, the documents that came to light as a result, as well as the fact-finding commission’s report, the final verdict of the chairs of the Wolesi Jirga standing commissions and, last but not least, the fact that speaker Ibrahimi agreed to pay back the money he had illegally spent from the budget (Tolo reported on 30 December 2017 that he still has not re-payed the amount) all indicate that there were at least grave irregularities in the dealings of the Wolesi Jirga Secretariat and that these involved the speaker.

At the same time, the way the MPs dealt with Homayun’s accusations reflected the grave shortcomings of the parliament, whose re-election h is long overdue. It highlighted again that the parliament continues to struggle with a lack of attendance, sufficient understanding (or conscious bending) of its rules and procedures (see Homayun’s first attempt to estabish a fact-finding commission despite the lack of a quorum) and, most dangerously a lack of internal oversight. Past and present accusations that a majority of MPs may be corrupt, either actively or passively, also stand in the way of genuine investigations. Many MPs will just fear that they might become the next target.

One thing is for sure: the almost three-year extension of the Wolesi Jirga’s mandate due to the elections being long overdue (see these AAN analyses on elections here and here) is neither helping Afghanistan’s parliamentary democracy nor the government’s anti-corruption efforts. After the next election would be high time to straighten parliament’s internal procedures, increase transparency and strengthen internal and external oversight of the Secretariat. Unfortunately, it is not easy as things stand to see Afghanistan getting a new parliament that will be any better at policing itself than the current one.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Kate Clark

 

 

 

(1) The last Afghan parliamentary election deserving of the name took place in 1969, when the country was still ruled by the monarchy. The next one, which should have happened in 1973, was prevented by that year’s coup d’état led by Sardar Muhammad Daud (in power 1973-78). There was another Wolesi Jirga election in 1988 under President Najibullah, but seats were allocated in advance and there was almost no turnout, not even in Kabul.

(2) Apart from the Secretariat (dar ul-ensha) and in accordance with article 87 of the Constitution, the Wolesi Jirga has an Administrative Board (hayat-e edari). This is sometimes also (but wrongly) called the secretariat, as – apart from the speaker and the first and second deputy speakers, it also includes the positions of a secretary and a deputy secretary of the board. The Board is elected annually from among the MPs and is in charge of chairing the plenary sessions and those of the chairs of the house’s permanent commissions (who are responsible for deciding the agenda of the individual Wolesi Jirga sessions). It further manages the Wolesi Jirga’s external relations. In the Afghan bureaucratic hierarchy, the Secretariat (dar ul-ensha) is called a general secretariat, giving its head the rank of a general secretary.

See also AAN’s guide to the Afghan parliament, here.

(3) The Wolesi Jirga’s operational budget for the last three years has been around 20 million USD per year, see here. Its personnel costs are not known.

(4) At that point, Khudai Nazar Nasrat had been holding his current post since 2012. He started as the head of the Secretariat’s translators section in 2006, was appointed head of the Secretariat’s section for legislative and parliamentary affairs a year later and was promoted to deputy secretary general in 2011.

Ibrahimi was elected member of parliament in 2005 and 2010, and, during his first term, was a member of the Internal Affairs Commission. During the anti-Soviet and anti-Taleban struggles, he was a member of Hezb-e Islami. Upon being elected to parliament, he became a key ally of former President Hamed Karzai. Currently, he is a member of the Protection and Stability Council for Afghanistan under former mujahedin leader Abdul Rabb Rassul Sayyaf, a semi-oppositional alliance to the current president (see AAN analysis here).

(5) In Afghanistan, government entities can issue contracts of less than 500,000 Afghani (approximately 7,200 USD) without approval of the National Procurement Commission. Stationery contracts, which are usually small and below the threshold, often fall prey to corruption.

(6) Apart from Homayun Homayun (Khost), the leader of the Afghanistan-e Azad parliamentary group consists of: Muhammad Azim Mohsini (Baghlan) as deputy; Muhammad Reza Khoshak (Herat) as secretary; Muhammad Ibrahim Ghoshtali (Paktia) as first spokesman; Muhammad Arif Rahmani (Ghazni) as second spokesman. The remaining members are Fathullah Qaisari (Faryab); Abdul Wahid Faqirzada (Takhar); Ahmad Farhad Majidi (Herat); Arif Tayeb (Herat); Abdul Hadi Jamshidi (Herat); Abdul Rahim Ayubi (Kandahar); Samiullah Samim (Farah); Ashequllah Wafa (Baghlan); Abdul Qadir Zazai (Kabul); Ghulam Sarwar Fayez (Badghis); Semin Barekzai (Herat); Amir Khan Yar (Nangrahar); Wodod Paiman (Kunduz); Dilawar Aimaq (Baghlan); Aqa Jan (AAN could not identify from which province this MP comes); Ali Akbar Qasemi (Ghazni); Kubra Mustafawi (Kabul); Amir Jan Dawlatzai (Nangrahar) and Haji Ismail (Herat). Dr Naqibullah Fayeq (Faryab) used to be in the group, but he left parliament and is currently the head of the Afghanistan National Standard Authority (ANSA).

See Chapter Five on the Parliamentary Groups, of the Rules of the Wolesi Jirga’s Procedures, Article 18 to 21, here for details on parliamentary groups.

(7) Homayun claimed in his report that the head of the Secretariat stopped the coverage of the session, although Nasrat stated that he was not behind it. The acting head of Wolesi Jirga TV, Ms Tabasom (full name not available), and Halim Tanwir, a temporary member of staff, told the commission that the reason for the interruption was a technical malfunction.

There is another inconsistency in this affair. According to the fact-finding commission, Ms Tabasom was verbally appointed by Nasrat as acting-head of Wolesi Jirga TV; however according to the civil employees’ law, contracted staff cannot be appointed as acting heads in an office. Nasrat denied he had appointed her as acting head.

(8) The commission had one member of the Wolesi Jirga’s (standing) commissions for Internal Audit (Abdul Hafiz Mansur from Kabul), Finance and Budget (Zaifnun Safi from Laghman), Immunities and Privileges (Mawlawi Ahmadullah Mowahed from Nuristan) and Judicial and Justice Affairs (Muhammad Hussain Sharifi Balkhabi from Sar-e Pul), plus the deputy speaker, Erfanullah Erfan, as the chair.

(9) See AAN’s analysis about the strained relationship between the executive and parliament here.

 

Joel van Houdt, an independent Dutch photojournalist, who lived in Afghanistan for several years, has recently returned to Kabul to exhibit his photography on Afghan migration. The exhibition, entitled “Kuja meri? – Where are you going?”, comprises a series of about 50 photos that focus entirely on Afghanistan’s refugees and is displayed on the outer walls of the Ministry of Telecommunications compound in Kabul. Van Houdt chatted with AAN’s Jelena Bjelica about several highlights of his photo documentation project on Afghan migration.

Joel van Houdt’s interest and commitment is to document refugees and migrants, and this constitutes a significant part of his body of work. (1) Between 2007 and 2010 he worked on an independent project entitled “Entering Europe,” which documented Moroccans illegally entering Spain.

In 2012, while working on a story for the New York Times Magazine about Nimroz province, which borders Iran, van Houdt started documenting Afghan migration. Then, in 2013, he photographed Afghan and Iranian migrants crossing the Indian Ocean on their way to Australia. This exceptional undercover work was also published in the New York Times Magazine in November 2013 (more on this below). Following the Afghan exodus to Europe in 2015, van Houdt continued documenting Afghan refugees and migrants, including in Turkey, Europe and the United States. He successfully captured some historic moments, such as the closure of the Jungle camp in Calais in October 2016 (more on this below). “It felt right to continue following the Afghan story once I left the country,” he explained.

Van Houdt chose black and white photography as his medium of expression for the Kuja Meri? project because of the dramatic contrast he envisaged occurring between his black and white pictures and Kabul’s colourful streets, where he hoped to exhibit them. He was spot on. The Kabul exhibition was implemented with the support of the ArtLords, a local artistic group that creates street art or, as they put it, seizes “the opportunity for converting the negative psychological impact of blast walls on the people of Kabul into a positive visual experience.” The ArtLords helped van Houdt to place the 3.3 metre by 2.2 metre prints, which he produced in the Netherlands, on the blast walls around the Ministry of Telecommunications. His exhibition attracted the attention of the Minister of Refugees and Repatriation, Sayed Hussain Alimi Balkhi, who gave van Houdt an award for his exceptional coverage of Afghan migration at a ceremony held on 12 November 2017 at the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University.

1. Turkey, Istanbul

An audience of mostly Afghans watches a wrestling match in Sahil Park. Matches take place every Sunday in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district, where many Afghan refugees and migrants live, often awaiting a chance to travel onwards to the European Union. (9 July 2017). Photo: Joel van Houdt

I knew that there would be a lot of Afghans in the Zeytinburnu area. I walked around and after a couple of days I found this giant circle of Afghans watching a wrestling match in the middle of the park near the sea. Every Sunday Afghans gather in the Zeytinburnu area to watch wrestling matches. They also frequent the park in that area to have picnics. I would say that almost 80 per cent of the people in the park are Afghans.

I had help from an Afghan guy who showed me around Istanbul. He had just arrived in Turkey when I met him. He was trying to find a way of continuing [his journey onwards from] from Turkey. He was a former interpreter for the United States military. He had worked for them for five or six years. He said he was blacklisted, because he had a corruption charge. He denied it. So, he was there in Turkey and he was trying to get to Germany. He hoped that from Germany at some point he would be able to go to the US… He was on a long journey. He emailed me maybe two weeks after I took this picture to say that he had crossed the border into Greece.

You can see in the picture that behind the crowd there is a road, and it’s here that a lot of Afghans live in Turkey. The guy that was showing me around lived there with four other Afghans. It is kind of the area where they hang around, some of them live there for several years or even longer – like an Afghan man I met, who has been in Turkey for 14 years. He did not have any plans to leave Turkey.

When I took this picture, I thought these two high-rises in the background were quite interesting. They reminded me of the World Trade Centre, but maybe that is just me… maybe I am pushing it a bit for other people. It did cross my mind, however. I felt there was a connection between the beginning of the war in Afghanistan and these people 16 years later in Turkey, trying to move on. It was symbolic.

(See also this AAN analysis about the situation for Afghan migrants in Turkey).

2. Greece, Lesbos

Afghan teenager Mortaza swims in the Aegean Sea in the port of Mitilini. The coast of Turkey, from where he arrived, can be seen in the background. He is staying with other Afghan minors in a house in Mitilini waiting for the Greek government to decide on his asylum request. (14 June 2017) – Photo: Joel van Houdt

This picture was taken at the port in Lesbos from which ferries to the mainland depart. It was also the place where many Afghans gathered in the hope that they would catch the ferry to the mainland, while, in reality, they are not allowed to leave the island of Lesbos. I was at the port and found this group of Afghan minors swimming. They were just killing time.

I chose this moment, of a boy swimming, because there is a moment of reflection in it. He is kind of helpless… For me that moment corresponds with his situation because he is waiting for the Greek government to decide on his future. He does not know what will happen to him, whether he will be sent to Afghanistan when he turns 18 years old. He does not have any security. He can only wait on the island. I felt that this picture tells that story the best. Also, because he floats motionless on the water, it is a metaphor of all of the people who have drowned crossing the sea. You can see in the background of the photo the Turkish coast, and just think how many people have died crossing that narrow stretch between the Turkish mainland and the Greek island.

The most difficult part of documenting the situation in Greece was the interaction with the Greek government. The Greek police have been horrible. There is not much press freedom in Greece these days. I was near the Idiomeni camp when the Greek government was trying to close it, and they were not allowing any journalists access to the area. Ten miles from Idiomeni there were some refugees protesting and the police even tried to stop me from taking pictures there. It was not easy to work in Greece, access to the camps has been limited by the government. It is extremely difficult to get permission for any official camp there. In terms of access, Greece was really difficult. But, more or less anywhere else in Europe, the situation is similar. For example, in Germany near Frankfurt there are former US military barracks, which have now been turned into a camp for refugees. I thought this was also an interesting place to photograph, because of Afghans fleeing the US-led war in their country only to end up in former US barracks in Germany. So I spent two weeks writing letters and making phone calls, and I never got permission to take pictures inside that camp in Germany. In that sense, Greece cannot be singled out.

But refugees have always been friendly and hospitable and they like to be photographed and to tell their stories. This obviously is not the case in every situation. Once I tried to take pictures of refugees illegally trying to board ferries going to Italy in the port of Patras in Greece. They were climbing over a fence in the port and they were not very happy to have me around with my camera. In their tents, where they cook and drink tea, they like to have me, but not when they were in action, ie trying to cross the border illegally. The same goes for the Greek police. In the port of Patras, one night I was trying to take a picture of 40-something refugees climbing over a fence – I was not even inside the port, but on the road. The police came and they interrogated me for half an hour, while the refugees kept jumping over the fence. My impression is that the Greek police were more nervous about a photographer than the refugees climbing the fence.

(See also this AAN dossier about Afghan migration to Europe; about crossing to Italy here and here; and about the smuggling routes in the Balkans here)

3. Serbia, Belgrade

Afghan men try to wash Nabikhan, also known as Comando, from Afghanistan’s Nangrahar province. They say he lost his mind after the Croatian police hit him on the head with a stick one month ago and gave him electric shocks. Croatian and Hungarian police often force refugees and migrants back into Serbia when they try to cross the EU-border at night. Other Afghans are trying to find a way to bring Nabikhan back to Afghanistan because of his mental illness. An estimate of close to one thousand refugees and migrants stay here in sub-zero temperatures behind the central train and bus station in the Serbian capital Belgrade. Many have been stuck here for months while hoping to cross the closed borders with Hungary or Croatia. There are not enough government facilities but many also prefer not to apply for asylum in Serbia, and try to continue their journey to Northern Europe. (24 December 2016) – Photo: Joel van Houdt

I spent quite a bit of time in a Belgrade squat. It was one of the hardest places I visited, in terms of the conditions in which people lived. It was winter, temperatures were often below zero Celsius. They lived in a warehouse and had been burning plastic junk inside. The warehouse was full of smoke. They were balancing between dying of suffocation or dying from cold, and they lived in these conditions for months. (See AAN’s analysis about a Belgrade squat here)

For me that situation was quite disturbing. And this guy Comando, from the picture, he was really not well. His friends had been worried and they were trying to clean him up. They were also trying to figure out how to send him back to Afghanistan. There were no non-governmental or governmental organisations in the warehouse that would take care of him.

(The situation with aid providers in the Belgrade squat changed several months later, see this 2017 AAN analysis here).

4. France, Calais

An Afghan refugee packs his belongings while a fire destroys his tent in “The Jungle” on the third day of a police operation. The French authorities are trying to close and demolish the makeshift refugee camp next to the highway leading to the port of Calais. An estimated 8,000 refugees and migrants have been staying here, trying to reach the UK. (26 October 2016) – Photo: Joel van Houdt

As a photographer, what I enjoy the most is capturing some surreal moments, like this one in Calais. This picture may not look clear at the first sight, it perhaps requires a more careful read, so to say. It takes time to interpret what is really going on there.

I had just arrived in Calais from Italy, when ten minutes later everything went up in flames in the Jungle camp. Although I spent several weeks during September and October 2016 in Calais, at the time it was still not clear when the French authorities would close it down, but it had been rumoured for a long time that it would be closed.

It was a kind of surreal place to be at that very moment. Many Afghans, but also the migrants of other nationalities, were forced to leave the Jungle camp. They were put on buses. But as they were leaving the camp, the tents or makeshift houses were disappearing in smoke. At one point I had seen some young guys, probably minors, on bicycles with torches in their hands, going around the camp. I guess people had mixed feelings… they had lived there for year(s), even though it was not a great place to live. Still they called it ‘home.’ I like this picture because I think it captures that surreal moment.

(See also these AAN dispatches about Afghan asylum seekers in Europe here and here) 

5. Australia, Indian Ocean, between Indonesia and Australia

Morning, the second day of a three-day boat journey from Indonesia to Australia, on the deck of a 30-foot long boat that is carrying 57 asylum seekers. They are all Iranian except for one Afghan man from Kunduz, Afghanistan, and two Indonesian crew members. Their destination is an Australian territory, more than 200 miles across the Indian Ocean, called Christmas Island. They had left southern Java, Indonesia, in the early hours of September 6th and were to be taken to Australian’s Christmas Island by the Navy on the morning of September 9th. Then they would be taken to the island’s detention centres from where all asylum seekers would be flown to Papua New Guinea or the tiny republic of Nauru. To discourage future asylum seekers on this route Australia eliminated, in 2013, the possibility of any boat person ever settling in Australia. Over the past decade, it is believed that more than a thousand asylum seekers have drowned along this route. (7 September 2013) – Photo: Joel van Houdt

When the 2014 exit date for foreign troops in the country drew nearer, a lot of Afghan friends started asking us how and where to leave. Around that time, Australia changed its policy, which stipulated that any person arriving by boat was not allowed to claim asylum. For us, Luke Mogelson, a writer, and I, these were the main reason to try to do the story about Afghan migration to Australia. We decided to pretend to be refugees from Georgia. Georgia was a random choice. We were on the phone with a smuggler and we had to come up with a country. We felt that chances on running up on another Georgian on this trip were minimal, so we just went on with it. It later turned out that we were wrong, a woman from Iran in the safe house in Jakarta, who had lived for many years in Georgia, was trying to chat to us in Georgian.

We found a smuggler and then went to the hawala market in Kabul (money exchange market) to pay him. We received a code to give to the smuggler once we had made it to Australia. The smuggler was not in Kabul or in the market. We paid 4,000 USD each for the trip from Indonesia to Australia. We told the smuggler that we would arrange on our own the trip from Kabul to Jakarta.

Once we arrived in Jakarta we got in touch with our handler and they put us in the safe house with other refugees. There we waited for weeks to take a boat trip. The toughest part of working on this assignment was actually the waiting, not the journey itself. There is a lot of time to think about what can go wrong, thinking about sharks and boats, that, once you board, there is no way back, etc. I was really worried about the boat, whether it would be a proper boat for a journey on the ocean. When the day came to board the boat, they first put us in small skiffs. Later on, I was happy to see that it was a wooden 30-foot boat. We spent days on the open sea. It was a really distressing experience. Many people were seasick. There was no toilet. We had very little food or water between 57 of us. I was sunburned and thirsty by the time we reached Christmas Island.

I told people in the safe house that I used to be a photographer in Georgia. I even bought a retro looking camera at Dubai airport on the way to Jakarta, a Fujifilm x100s. I scrapped the camera with the keys and other sharp objects, to make it more authentic. Although we did not talk a lot on the boat with each other, because everyone was just trying to survive, I would occasionally take a photograph and people were okay with that. The camera did not last for very long. It died several months later, from the sea water during this trip.

Luke and I decided at the last moment to get Australian visas in Jakarta. We applied for electronic visas in an internet café nearby our safe house. Once we arrived at Christmas Island we pulled out our passports and the coastal guard let us go. We were lucky, because for our fellow travellers, the worst part of the journey was just beginning. They would have to spend months in detention, waiting to either be deported or allowed to enter Australia. I think it is important to report on a story based on experience. Without experiencing it, it is really hard to fully understand what these people go through. Of course, we only experienced a small part of it, because of our western passports.

(See The Dream Boat story in the New York Times Magazine, here).

6. USA, Sacramento

Afghans gather to pray and celebrate Eid ul-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, in Sacramento. Most here are members of a newly formed Afghan community, many of them former interpreters for the US Armed Forces and USAID. They came to the US on Special Immigration Visas (SIV). (6 July 2016) – Photo: Joel van Houdt

Usually when I photograph, I find it more powerful to focus on one person or one family, or even a small group. But for this project, I thought it was important to photograph all of the different places and show different examples of where Afghans currently reside. I only scratched the surface, there are so many countries that I did not photograph, but I thought that going to the US to document Afghans there, who had recently fled the US-led war in the country, was extremely important.

The people in the picture are all former interpreters for the US army and most of them fled Afghanistan in the last two years. They live in Sacramento pretty close to each other in the apartment block, where almost every apartment is occupied by an Afghan. A lot of them work in an iPhone repair centre. They usually only get a one-year contract and are fired after a year, because in the US, after a year’s contract they should be given a proper contract, which, for many of them, never happens. It is a strange situation that they have found themselves in Sacramento.

I found that in Freemont (California), as in Virginia, both original places for Afghan migrants in the US, fewer and fewer people can afford to settle there, mainly because it has become really expensive thanks to the Google and Facebook headquarters based closed by. This is why many of them end up in Sacramento, which is a cheaper place to live. In Freemont, near the mosque, I met this well-built ex-Special Forces guy from Afghanistan, who is now driving a tow truck. He fled to the US seven years ago. He said that he hates life in the US and that he wants to go back to Afghanistan.

For many of them, life in the US is very harsh. They do not get a lot of money from the government. They are also not allowed to bring that many family members, only a wife (or a husband) and children. For Afghans, this is a very difficult situation, to live so far from their close relatives. Also the time difference of 12 hours makes people feel really cut off from their families and loved ones, from their previous lives and their country. It is definitely not ‘the easy ride’, considering that these people are seen as the success story of Afghan migration.

 

 

(1) Joel van Houdt is currently based in Moscow. He lived in Kabul between 2010 and 2015 and worked for various publications, travelling through much of the country, reporting on the war, the  Taleban insurgency and warlords.

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Afghanistan’s budget for the next financial year, 1397/2018, is markedly different from previous ones. This is a budget written to ‘international standards’, giving more information, both on 2018 and earlier years, as well as future projections, with detail at the level of ministry, project and province. The Ministry of Finance has tried to be realistic in allocating money according to what ministries actually spend and has abandoned the practice of carrying over unspent funds to the next year. It has also tried to reduce unallocated contingency budgets. These measures, it says, are aimed at “lowering corruption and making the budget a much more effective tool for national development.” The cabinet and the upper house have approved the budget, but, in parliament, MPs are said to be unhappy. Guest author Bill Byrd* and AAN’s Kate Clark have been looking at the figures and assessing the budget’s likely impact.

Afghanistan’s budget for 2018 (Afghan fiscal year 1397) (1) was approved by the cabinet on 5 November 2017, submitted to the Meshrano Jirga (upper house) on 6 November and approved by it on 21 November (with comments). It was sent to the Wolesi Jirga on 22 November. It is a budget designed to deal in particular with two hard problems facing the Afghan state.

First, the amount of international money coming into the country has declined and is expected to decline further in coming years – this in a country which is extremely dependent on foreign aid. Second, is the vulnerability to corruption in the budget process, a process which, in the words of Integrity Watch Afghanistan (in a report to be published on 5 December), “has been riddled with incompetence, corruption, and collusion among the Executive and the National Assembly in the last decade.” The constitution gives MPs important blocking powers. Their approval is needed to pass the national budget. They can also put additional pressure on candidate ministers, who have to get MPs’ votes of confidence to be appointed (a procedure which took place yesterday, 4 December 2017), and on ministers, whom MPs can summon to parliament and give votes of no confidence, in a procedure known as estizah. (2) The result has been a pattern of deal-making, with public funds finding their way into the pockets of MPs and government officials. The Ministry of Finance argues that this budget will help deal with both issues and will “reduce corruption and strengthen public financial management.”

Before looking at the budgetary reforms and numbers in detail, it is useful to look in more depth at those two problems and why the Ministry of Finance says it has to face up to them.

Confronting the prospect of declining international funding

Afghanistan, said the World Bank in 2016, “is unique worldwide in its extraordinary dependence on foreign aid.” Quoting the 2013 figure of aid amounting to 45 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it said this aid is “critical to financing growth, service delivery, and security.” Despite four-year aid commitments made in 2016 at international meetings in Warsaw (for security assistance) and Brussels (for civilian aid), the overall amount of aid has been gradually declining (more on this later). The reduction is coming on top of a massive reduction in money brought into and spent in Afghanistan by the international military over the years 2011-2014, as they almost completely withdrew their combat troops. This massive reduction in military expenditure imposed an enormous ‘demand shock’ to the economy, causing economic growth to fall from near double-digit levels to low single-digits – no higher or even lower than population growth, meaning that, over the past five years, the Afghan economy has essentially been ‘running in place’ with no gain in average per-capita incomes.

Other ‘headwinds’ have also battered the Afghan economy in recent years, including the political uncertainty associated with the 2014 presidential election and National Unity Government formation; the, until recently, time-bound US military commitment and deteriorating security; shrinking government reach into many rural areas; and multiple security risks to business, including high-profile urban terrorist attacks and kidnappings. Low economic growth inevitably reduced the rate of increase of government revenue, a problem which was compounded during 2014 by a fiscal crisis driven by a haemorrhage of government revenues before, during and after the presidential election. Lower revenue meant that the government could not pay some of its bills. There was a build-up of arrears and requests for short-run ‘emergency assistance’ from donors. (3)

Since then, revenue has recovered and has grown rapidly during 2015-2017, easing the short-term fiscal crunch. It has not, however, significantly reduced Afghanistan’s deep dependency on aid in the face of growing expenditure needs, especially for the security forces.

While total international financial inflows have declined (both aid and military spending), the income stream that has held up reasonably well is flexible, on-budget aid going through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) and through new initiatives, notably the United States’ National Development Partnership and European Union’s State Building Contract. This type of aid has been critically important for allowing the government to carry on functioning, including spending on development activities. However, from a narrow budgetary perspective, it may also have reduced the pressure to confront the hard fiscal realities looming over the horizon, allowing the government to delay facing up to the unwelcome prospect of declining aid. Given the many serious political and security problems facing the Afghan state, this may not be surprising. Moreover, the Ministry of Finance has been focussing on and prioritising increasing revenue (on the success of this, see here and here). The push to raise more government revenues may have come at the expense of other budgetary reforms. That has all changed with the 2018 budget. Its focus is squarely on the expenditure side. It is, in part, an attempt to prepare for and adjust to expected declining aid flows.

This is the first budget that provides projections for a year, 2021, that is not covered by existing international aid commitments. Unlike the 2017 budget, the time horizon of this budget goes beyond the four-year period covered by the aid pledges made in the 2016 international meetings on Afghanistan for security assistance (Warsaw) and development aid (Brussels). It does not assume that aid will continue at current levels. “There are no guarantees,” the budget document says, “that international assistance will remain at current levels. It is prudent to assume that aid will reduce and become more variable, based on meeting performance benchmarks.”

The lack of ‘fiscal space’ and the squeeze on the amount of money the government has to spend has made it all the more important that the government funds the most urgent national priorities and does not waste resources on lower-priority and poorly-performing activities. Despite the fiscal squeeze having been a reality for several years, prioritising spending has not been easy to accomplish, for several reasons. First, most of the budget pays for fixed spending (most notably civil servants’ and security forces’ salaries) or pre-committed expenditure (donor-funded projects whose funding cannot be shifted easily – or at all – to other projects). Thus, it is extremely difficult to make substantial changes in the bulk of the budget within the one-year time horizon covered by the budget’s authorised allocations. Second, past practices such as automatic ‘carry-over’ of unspent budget allocations for development projects to the subsequent year further contributed to budgetary rigidity. It meant that even poorly or non-performing activities could carry on getting funds, thereby blocking the movement of resources to higher-priority and quicker-impact purposes. Carrying over funds has been, in effect, a way of rewarding inefficiency, ineptness and corruption.

The prospective decline in foreign aid is only one of the serious risks looming on the horizon which the Ministry of Finance says make reforms of the budget vital. Among the risks it cites are further deterioration in security, political uncertainties around the upcoming election cycle, natural disasters, increasing government staffing and associated rise of the wage bill, ballooning government pension liabilities which will constitute an increasing drag on the budget over the longer-term and other contingent liabilities such as those associated with public-private partnerships and guarantees.

Another factor increasing the pressure to bring in reforms now is that this is the last annual budget that will be fully implemented before the next presidential election in 2019. Waiting to initiate major reforms until 2019, possibly after parliamentary elections (currently scheduled for 2018) and perhaps with a new parliament taking office during the budget preparation process, would have been risky and perhaps even a non-starter. (4)

Corruption and the budget

Concern about corruption in the budget process is the other major motivating factor behind the reforms. The need to obtain parliamentary approval for budgets, backed up by MPs being able to threaten to oust government ministers (through no-confidence vote), creates opportunities for corruption, as do bureaucratic interactions between various parts of the Ministry of Finance and other ministries and agencies. Points of greatest vulnerability to corruption include: a) machinations around pre-budget hearings; b) when allocations and new projects are approved during the budget formulation process; c) when the approval of the budget by Parliament is sought; and d) when allotments are approved and contracts entered into during the budget implementation process. (5) Documenting the alleged deal-making in the Afghan parliament is tricky, although see here and here for two investigations. Last year (1396), the budget was initially rejected by 136 out 140 MPs. At that point, says Integrity Watch Afghanistan in its report to be published on 5 December, the bargaining began: “The Ministry of Finance and Wolesi Jirga against the letter and spirit of the Constitution and relevant laws, agreed to allow each MP to have their projects of choice in the National Budget 1396. As a result, 350 projects worth of USD 70 million was forced into the National Budget. The National Budget 1396 was approved by 139 out of 140 MPs and the Minister of Finance received a certificate of excellence for his work.” (See also AAN reporting here). Such bargaining is likely also to result in a tendency to inflate budget expenditure targets and allocations, building in shortfalls in actual spending in relation to targets. It can lead to misallocation of resources and mismanagement.

One would also want to ‘follow the money’ to see who gets contracts to implement government programmes, how much money gets lost in sub-contracting and how much is then left to actually spend on projects: one government official speaking to AAN estimated that 30-40 per cent of the budget has been getting lost “before the first shovel hits the ground.” Such skimming off of government expenditure often results in shoddy work that may be hazardous (poorly built schools, clinics and roads).

The amount of money that is lost through bargaining between government officials and MPs (in ways that personally benefit both sides) is not known or easy to assess, and it may well be less than corruption in some other spheres of activity in Afghanistan, such as government appointments, bribe-taking and extortion by security forces, regulations (paying for a driving license or a business permit) or services (paying for an education certificate or for health services) and the corruption linked to off-budget aid (not covered in the budget), mining or the opium economy. More important than the outright financial losses, however, is the resulting distortions, inefficiencies, delays and waste associated with corruption in public expenditures, which Afghanistan can ill-afford.

How is the 2018 budget different?

The changes embodied in the 2018 budget can be divided into several categories, though many of the reforms affect more than one of them.

Greater overall transparency

This budget marks a significant advance in presenting a fully consolidated picture of Afghanistan’s public finances, what the budget document calls a “cleaned up” budget, “more realistic and credible.” Total resources for the budget – from various government tax and non-tax revenues, donor grants and other sources – are comprehensively presented. On the expenditure side, the consolidated budget presentation includes the operating budget (government salaries and operations and maintenance, or O&M), the so-called ‘discretionary’ development budget, which consists of projects and programmes paid for by the government through its own resources (ie from government revenues) and the so-called ‘non-discretionary’ development budget – on-budget projects funded by donors with resources earmarked for those particular projects and programmes. (6) It excludes off-budget donor funding, much, though not all of which goes to the security sector but which also funds development projects executed directly by donors and their contractors. In the past, the quite different financing, decision-making processes and implementation mechanisms for these different categories resulted in a tendency to view them in isolation from each other, detracting from the good-practice imperative for the budget to provide a consolidated overall picture of the country’s public finances. Recognising these differences, the new budget nevertheless does provide a consolidated picture, both overall and broken down by categories and agencies. (7)

Thus for the first time, the budget is fully transparent. There are no hidden numbers, so specialists who are able to read budget tables should be able to see exactly how much money the government has and where it is going. This could lead to some interesting revelations as specialists work through the figures. Look out for work on sectors – where money for education is being spent, for example – or comparisons of spending on different provinces.

More conservative, realistic budget projections

In addition to a refreshingly sober assessment of the current situation, future economic and fiscal prospects and risks as mentioned above, the 2018 budget includes significantly more conservative projections than its predecessors:

• Projected real GDP growth in 2018-2020 (1397-99) – at 3.4 per cent per year – is on average more than one percentage point lower than it was in the 2017. (8)
• Government revenue projections are also lower thereby reducing the scope for inflated expenditure in the budget given the essentially balanced budget approach. For the three years following the annual budget year, (2019, 2020 and 2021), this budget projects revenue increasing on average by more than two percentage points less per year than the 2017 budget did for its three outer years. (9)
• On-budget aid projections are much more conservative in the 2018 budget. Grant receipts in 2017 were lower than budgeted for that year, resulting in an estimated shortfall of more than Afs 27 billion (close to 400m USD). This budget projects grants dropping by a further Afs 41 billion (approaching 600m USD) in 2018, another Afs 9 billion (130m USD) in 2019 and a further Afs 15 billion (220m USD) in 2020. As a result, donor grants in the latter year are projected to be around Afs 65 billion (more than 900m USD), ie 29 per cent less than in 2017.
• Most strikingly, the 2018 budget projects what it calls a ‘fiscal cliff’ for the final year of its forward estimates—2021, in which donor grants are projected to be Afs 75 billion (more than billion USD) lower than in 2020, a precipitous decline of 46 per cent in that year alone. Cumulatively, this represents a projected reduction of Afs 140 billion (on the order of two billion USD) or 61 per cent from 2017.

These conservative ‘baseline’ projections exclude the possible positive impacts from further reforms, or, particularly for 2021, possible donor decisions to make the decline in aid after completion of the Brussels and Warsaw commitments more gradual. Nevertheless, as a starting point for budgeting, the government is including only what it thinks it can safely rely on, not what it might hope for.

A final measure worth noting, since it also has ramifications for other areas of the budget reforms, is the shift away from using the previous year’s budget targets for budgeting. Instead, the 2018 budget uses the previous year’s estimated actual expenditures. As the development budget, in particular, chronically falls short of budget targets, this change also has the effect of making the expenditure targets in the current year’s budget more conservative.

Overall, this more conservative approach is intended to strengthen fiscal discipline and also to focus attention on efficiency improvements and reprioritisation of expenditures. The aim is to ease constraints and make the best possible use of the limited fiscal space available for spending.

Better development programming

The 2018 budget introduces multi-year projections for individual projects and programmes, covering the same three-year time horizon beyond the budget year. This good-practice improvement not only provides visibility on the medium-term costs of programmes and projects, but also forces consistency between projections of budgetary aggregates and the individual components of the budget. In other words, the sum of the forward estimates for individual programmes and projects in a sector must add up to the total for the sector. This imposes some discipline which was not there in the past.

The budget strives to largely eliminate the pervasive phenomenon of ‘carry-overs’, whereby funds budgeted for spending on a given project or programme in a certain fiscal year were simply carried over to the next fiscal year if unspent. Greater discipline should come from this change to a ‘use it or lose it’ approach. Carrying over funds also contributed greatly to the chronic shortfalls in development budget execution, since funds and allocations that had little prospect of being fully spent were repeatedly rolled over into the following year’s budget.

The 2018 budget also makes a strong distinction between expenditures on ongoing activities that were already approved on a multi-year basis and new initiatives, with primary focus on the latter and on whether they are in line with national development priorities. Moreover, at the level of ministries and agencies, the 2018 budget establishes a principle that ministries and agencies proposing new spending initiatives should find savings from other activities to offset the additional expenditures. This is intended to encourage micro-level fiscal discipline and curb the tendency to submit large numbers of new project proposals without prioritising between them.

There have been years of over-budgeting and underspending (low execution rates), something which has undermined the credibility of governments and ministries. That, says the budget document, should now change:

Poor practices in program and project planning and rigid project structures that do not allow money to be redirected from under-performing or lower priority activities to better performers or higher priorities are some of the major drivers of this dynamic. This process will be targeted at removing poor performing or low priority programs from the budget over the next few years.

The Ministry of Finance hopes this budget will enable the government to achieve “an execution rate of at least 95 per cent.”

Reducing the scope for corruption

The 2018 budget is striving to reduce the scope for corruption during the budget process, addressing the vulnerabilities pointed out earlier, in various ways.

First, the consolidation and greater transparency of budget allocations and multi-year projections, laid out earlier, will also be helpful from an integrity perspective.

Moreover, the 2018 budget fully recognises the corruption risks associated with unallocated ‘contingency’ budget categories – which amounted to Afs 57 billion (over 800m USD) in the 2017 budget and which to a large extent are actually non-allocations open to bargaining, rent-seeking and corruption during budget implementation. Unspent contingency funds can be and are shifted to other uses during budget implementation, with less transparency and greater risk of corruption. Drastically reducing contingency allocations would not only be good for transparency and budgeting, it would also reduce the space for bribery and other irregularities to occur as contingency funds are allocated for specific purposes during the fiscal year. A small start has been made with the 2018 budget in reducing the magnitude of existing contingencies by about 8 per cent, though more than half of this reduction has been offset by new contingencies mainly for funding of power-plants.

There has been, says the 2018 budget document, “systematic over-budgeting particularly on the discretionary budget.” Such allocations are extremely vulnerable to corruption, for example, money might only be released after payments were made. The elimination of discretionary carry-over of unspent budget allocations into the following year’s budget should also held reduce vulnerability to corruption.

The 2018 budget, in its Budget Execution Rules, sets forth some provisions setting parameters for entering into government contracts and limits on discretion in this regard, in what appears to be an attempt to limit the scope for corruption in the contracting process.

On the other hand, budget allotments (authority to spend) will be provided, based on the approved budget and financial plans of ministries and agencies submitted to the Ministry of Finance, twice a year covering six months each. This appears to be an attempt to make the process of allotting funding during budget implementation, a point of vulnerability to corruption, more automatic and less subject to the discretion of the Ministry of Finance officials approving allotments.

Next steps in reform

As emphasised in the budget document, this budget is just a first step to push forward with reforms, better mechanisms and processes, but does not yet embody their implementation in its budget targets and allocations. The 2018 mid-term budget review – which will happen halfway through the fiscal year – will be much more than a typical mid-year exercise, but rather what is termed as “a full-scale supplementary budget process in mid-1397.” Ministries and agencies will be instructed to prepare new policy proposals in line with national priorities, fully costed and with economic evaluations, for consideration at mid-year. Priorities for the supplementary budget are, according to the budget document: (1) infrastructure, (2) agriculture, (3) urban development and (4) culture and development.

The budget document also indicates that the annual budget process will be revised “from next year” to better align budget outcomes with national priorities. Though details are not provided, it states that:

Over the course of the next few budget cycles, this reformed process will help to align all expenditure financed by domestic revenue and development assistance to national priorities, including by reallocating funds in the national budget.

One priority for the 2019 budget would be to realize the 2018 budget’s expressed intent to slash and rationalize the still-large contingency component of the budget.

Will the budgetary reforms succeed? Opportunities, but also risks – including political backlash

The 2018 budget represents a laudable effort and demonstration of political will. Government sources told AAN it had been tough getting the budget through the cabinet. Getting parliamentary approval is expected to be even tougher. Parliament (which is now more than two years past its normal term in office) could block parts or all of the budget.

A second milestone will be the much heavier-than-normal load that will have to be carried by the mid-term review of the budget, which will involve further acceleration of reforms resulting in a new ‘Supplementary Budget’ – far more substantial than the typical fine-tuning that occurs in the mid-year review. Then the 2019 (1398) budget is expected to fully embed the reforms initiated in this budget, at a time when there will be a new parliament just coming into existence (if parliamentary elections are held on schedule in 2018) or the existing parliament will be finishing up (if parliamentary elections are delayed into 2019) (see AAN reporting on this, here).

There is little time left until the next election cycle for the reforms to be fully implemented and to take hold, let alone get past the point where positive achievements and results start outweighing bureaucratic inertia and political resistance and any associated backlash.

The 2018 budget’s sharp focus on fiscal discipline at both macro and micro levels is welcome, but may carry the risk of pushing the budget into a fiscal policy stance which could tend towards contracting the economy. This would be manifested by an increase in the government’s deposits at the central bank (Da Afghanistan Bank). Such a stance would not be appropriate in the current recessionary environment characterised by anaemic economic growth, with stagnant or declining average per-capita GDP. Instead, as advocated elsewhere, (see here), modest flexibility is called for and ensuring that the fiscal balance (the difference between government revenues and spending, after donor grants) does not become contractionary.

The conservative projections embodied in the 2018 budget, especially in the multi-year projections and in particular for donor grants, are praiseworthy and send a strong signal to Afghan stakeholders that the coming years are likely to see reduced levels of aid and correspondingly a tightening fiscal squeeze. However, there may be a risk that donors will misread the budget projections as signalling that Afghanistan no longer needs the current levels of aid (pledged for 2017-2020 at the Warsaw and Brussels meetings). Particularly in the case of the outermost year (2021), the precipitous reduction in aid shown in the budget projections for that year would be disastrous for the country. Thus, donors should welcome the government’s conservative realism, but not take that as a signal to sharply reduce their assistance let alone make the potential ‘fiscal cliff’ a reality.

The reforms to the budget are also fully consistent with the government’s recently unveiled anti-corruption strategy and its invigorated efforts to bring senior officials to account for corrupt activities. They may, of course, catalyse a political backlash, or weaken elite political support for the government, harming the budget’s prospects and possibly adversely affecting the next election cycle. Fewer resources may spark, not a recognition of the need to spend money wisely, but an intensified effort to grab what is available. So this budget carries political risks. Yet, doing nothing also carries risks. Carrying on with the kind of budgeting that obscured actual spending, helped facilitate corruption and ignored the reality of declining aid amounted to a postponement of hard decisions.

The government is treading a difficult course here. A political backlash (as well as bureaucratic resistance) could hinder the approval, implementation and achievements of the budgetary reforms. The administration and its president may have limited political capital to deal with this – witness the way opposition groups and figures have rallied against his alleged attempts to control election bodies. A more transparent budget with less contingency funding also means less money for the leader to reward friends and pay off enemies, which may not be the wisest course of action for anyone keen to stay in office, as elections approach. Yet at the same time, the government has to show itself as credible, if it wants to receive continuing high levels of international support. That means increasing government revenues to show it is serious about the Afghan state becoming more self-sustaining, cutting waste and corruption and demonstrating it can prioritise expenditures. Political support from the donors may be needed for any hard battles getting this budget through parliament without excessive recourse to bargaining.

Finally and irrespective of the level of any resistance or backlash, to what extent and when will success in implementing the budgetary reforms translate into substantial, visible improvements in budget outcomes – better actual spending on national priorities? Reforming the budget process is a necessary condition for improvements, but far from sufficient. Particularly in the highly constrained fiscal situation Afghanistan faces, creating fiscal space and shifting the structure of expenditures in favour of developmentally more beneficial, higher-priority programmes will take time, and their impact on key development outcomes, whether better healthcare and schooling, more electricity, roads and irrigation water, or others – will take even longer.

Overall, the reforms embodied in the 2018 budget are welcome, if anything overdue, and do set in motion improvements that have the potential to make a real difference in the future. Key are the budget’s recognition of hard realities; fully consolidating the overall fiscal picture; instituting more conservative, multi-year, fiscal planning and better project budgeting; squeezing the scope for rent sharing and corruption; and within the limits of harsh fiscal constraints, striving to increase fiscal space for priority initiatives that will help the economy grow.

However, the overall fiscal structure is so locked in and constrained by fixed, pre-committed expenditures that, particularly in the short run, the best that can be hoped for are marginal, not game-changing improvements. Afghanistan’s fundamental structural problems remain: it is highly aid dependent, has a persistently large fiscal gap (less revenue than spending) and will see a progressive squeeze on public investment over time. If the government does get this budget through, President Ghani or his successor should at least be left with a much surer sense of what money they have and where it is going.

 

* Bill Byrd is a senior expert at the US Institute of Peace, which funded his work on this dispatch. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the US Institute of Peace, which does not advocate specific policy positions

 

 

(1) The constitution (Article 92) gives parliament the right to summon and potentially oust high-ranking government officials who need a vote of confidence to secure their office (ministers or the heads of institutions equivalent to ministries, such as the heads of the Central Bank and the National Directorate of Security). The procedure is known as estizah or ‘interpellation’ (and is sometimes wrongly translated as ‘impeachment’). Read more about it here.

(2) Afghanistan’s fiscal year runs from approximately 21 December to 20 December; in this paper 2018 refers to Afghan FY 1397, 2019 to 1398, 2020 to 1399 and so on.

(3) See Byrd, William A, “Afghanistan’s Looming Fiscal Crisis: What Can Be Done” USIP Peace Brief No 177, 27 August 2014 and “Afghanistan’s Continuing Fiscal Crisis: No End in Sight” USIP Peace Brief No 185, 15 May 2015.

(4) Arguably, the 2018 budget and the associated reforms are already rather late in the current administration’s five-year term, with budget preparation beginning well over halfway through the term and the completion of the 2018 fiscal year covered by this budget occurring when the term will be 90 per cent finished and the country will already be well into the next presidential election season.

(5) See “The Blight of Auction-Based Budgeting: What is It and How can we Deal with It”, especially pp 3-4.

(6) This categorisation, which has been in place in Afghanistan for more than a decade, runs contrary to conventional terminology. Normally, wages and salaries and other committed expenditures that cannot be changed easily in the short run (eg interest payments on government debt) are considered non-discretionary. On-budget development projects, on the other hand typically are considered discretionary (regardless of their funding), since at least when initiated and also during the implementation process (at least insofar as project expenditures can be delayed or accelerated), these are based on government decisions and can be changed.

(7) This consolidated approach is welcome and by providing the overall picture, may inform future decision-making. However, the fragmentation of the national budget, particularly as between the discretionary and the non-discretionary development budget, will remain as an operational challenge, requiring coordination and not least, flexibility on the part of donors that are funding elements of the non-discretionary development budget.

(8) The difference is slightly less if comparing the moving average of three-year forward estimates between the two budgets (ie 2018-20 for the 2017 budget and 2019-2021 for the 2018 budget), since the latter average is 3.7 per cent per year, compared to 4.5 per cent per year in the 2017 budget.

(9) Revenue growth projections in the 2017 budget are 8.1 per cent in 2018, 7.2 per cent in 2019 and 8.0 per cent in 2020, compared to the 2018 budget which projects revenue growth at 4.6 per cent in 2019, 5.9 per cent in 2020 and 5.7 per cent in 2021 (all based on total revenue projections in the national currency – Afghanis).

The Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan (IEC) has announced 7 July 2018 as the date for the next parliamentary (and district councils) elections. It has started the preparations for the elections, but has been grappling with a lack of clarity about the budget and decisions about the use of technology in the elections. These issues have already dimmed the chance that elections can be held on schedule. AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili looks at the issues with the budget and controversy around the use of technology, as the IEC is already contemplating fallback date. (With a postscript about the selection process for a new IEC chairman by Thomas Ruttig.)

This is part two of a series of dispatches about the preparations for the next elections. Part one (read here) dealt with political aspects. The following parts will address more technical issues, and also the question of district council elections. In this part: the date, the budget and the back and forth concerning the use of election technology.

Setting the date for the elections

On 22 June 2017, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) announced that the next parliamentary and district council elections would be held on 16 Saratan 1397 (7 July 2018). These elections are long overdue. The term of the current Wolesi Jirga (the lower house of parliament) expired on 22 June 2015. According to the constitution, the elections should have been held 30 to 60 before the expiry date. (1)

This is the second time a date has been set for the elections. The first time, on 18 January 2016, the IEC (in its former composition – it has been changed since –, read about it here), after several attempts in 2015 – had announced the elections were to be held on 16 October 2016 (AAN’s previous reporting here). This date was not taken seriously by the government and donors, because most issues relating to electoral reform promised by the National Unity Government (NUG) leaders had remained unresolved.

By July 2018, the parliamentary election will have been more than three years overdue. The current Wolesi Jirga also will have served extra-constitutionally for more than three years.

One important issue to have stood in the way of holding the election is that the current president and chief executive, when they formed the NUG in September 2014, had agreed on the need for “fundamental changes” to the electoral laws and institutions with the objective to “implement electoral reform before the 2015 parliamentary elections” (full text of the agreement here). The reforms were delayed. It was only by November 2016 that a new electoral law was passed and members of both electoral commissions, the IEC and the Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC), were changed (see AAN’s previous reporting here; for an update on this see the postscript at the end of this text).

Both the government and the international community welcomed the announcement of the July 2018 election date. This included Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah who, as the runner-up in the controversial 2014 presidential election, in particular, had advocated electoral reform. He welcomed it as “a step towards [fulfillment of] the [NUG]’s commitments and institutionalisation of democracy.” The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), in its statement, even spoke of a “realistic date.” However, the IEC now operates with the assumption that the date is no longer achievable, as Wasima Badghisi, deputy and acting head of the IEC, said on a television debate on 20 November 2017 that there would be an election next year (2018), but with some flexibility about the date.

The budget and financing the elections

During the 22 June 2017 press conference, when the date was announced, (former) IEC chairman Najibullah Ahmadzai (who has been fired since, see AAN’s previous analysis here) said that the IEC had been assured of the election budget and security. According to the IEC, an estimated 210 million dollars is required for holding parliamentary and district council elections. On 14 November 2017, the head of the IEC secretariat, Imam Muhammad Warimach, told AAN that the amount also included the budget for the cost of election technology (more on the debate about election technology below). A deputy spokesman for the president, Najibullah Azad, told the BBC that 40 million dollars were already available in the Ministry of Finance, and the remaining amount would need to be provided by foreign donors.

Afghanistan itself lacks the financial ability to finance a mammoth operation, such as elections, and thus has heavily relied on international donors for funding ever since the first electoral cycle in 2004/05. On 3 October 2017, the IEC, the ECC and UNAMA signed an election project document, which is “providing the legal and financial framework allowing the UN and donors to support and strengthen Afghanistan’s electoral institutions and operations.” However, Warimach told AAN on 14 November 2017 that the IEC had not yet received any budget and only a few million dollars had been paid to the UNDP which only covers their internal expenses. UNDP has been administering the Enhancing Legal and Electoral Capacity for Tomorrow (ELECT) Project, which manages the election budget provided by donors (see more about the project’s phases and name changes in footnote (2)). Warimach further said that the donors told them that they had only 100 million dollars for both the parliamentary and presidential elections. This falls short of the IEC estimation of 210 million dollars required for the parliamentary and district council elections alone. This clearly indicates that there is no common understanding between the IEC and donors about the budget to finance the elections.

The debate about the use of technology

What are the concerns?

The NUG leaders and the IEC are keen to use modern technology solutions in the next elections – particularly biometric technology for voter registration. However, these solutions have already caused delays. Moreover, the IEC, the government and the international donors have been at odds as to what type and scope of technology would, in practice, improve the quality of the coming elections. Discussions have considered full or partial use of biometric voter registration (BVR) and voter verification (BVV), and electronic machines for voting, counting and result transmission.

The idea to introduce digital technology in the next parliamentary election arose first in early March 2017. The president, as its main advocate, pushed for it during several meetings with the IEC and ECC members, ambassadors and donor representatives. He argued that the use of such technology in future elections would “ensure [their] transparency.” (see here) In another meeting, the president complained that a similar 2002 proposal had met with “excuses,” and blamed donor reluctance for missing this opportunity. (This was as a result of a mix of reasons: Although the international community shouldered most of the budgets for the elections in 2004 and 2005, there was a reluctance to further increase the costs by introducing technology in later elections. In the initial post-Taleban years, there also were severe infrastructural hurdles – which still have not been overcome.) IEC officials and the NUG authorities have followed the president’s line and have been insisting since on the introduction of such technology.

However, many Afghan politicians and observers continued to question this obsession with technology. They expressed the following observations:

First, questioning the feasibility of introducing elections technology, for instance, Fazl Ahmad Manawi, a former head of the IEC and close ally of the chief executive, on 26 April 2017, called the use of technology in elections “under the current circumstance” a “political gamble” and “unfeasible” (see here).

Second, they have argued that technology alone could not be a suitable remedy for problems that are primarily political (see AAN’s previous reporting here and here) and that even the most modern technology could be manipulated, especially by the government, according to political opposition groups. For example, on 4 April 2017, Anwar-ul Haq Ahadi, the head of the opposition New National Front of Afghanistan, expressed concern that the new technology could be “misused even more hugely” and that he did not have “any doubt that the government [will use] this technology in its own favour, too.” (see here) The concerns about possible manipulation were also echoed by Muhammad Yusuf Rashid, the executive director of the Free and Fair Elections Foundation of Afghanistan (FEFA), who said on 26 April 2017 on TV that it was necessary “to inform the people”, so they know that it would not be “a controlled technology” and “is directly controlled, overseen by the IEC and they are accountable.”

Third, Afghan observers have pointed to the lack of consensus and institutional capacity as problems for adopting technological solutions. Rashid, for instance, mentioned during his April TV discussion that his organisation had held a conference on that day, “in which there was no agreement between the IEC and the ECC” and also among the political parties present. Moreover, Rashid said that, so far, the “whole capacity” of the IEC had been reliant upon a manual system, and the introduction of technology would need “time-consuming” capacity development.

Concerns have also been raised about potential providers of such technology. (3) Smart Matic reportedly gave a presentation in the Palace and to the IEC on 4 March 2017 when it appears it was the only competitor.

The feasibility study rejects the use of technology

As a result of these discussions, the international community agreed to fund the desired technology only if a feasibility study were conducted. Some local stakeholders interpreted the demand for this study as though the donors wanted to deny Afghans modern voting technology, because they deemed the country too backward. For example, IEC spokesman Gula Jan Badi Sayyad, on 26 April 2017, said during a TV discussion “if [that technology] is not feasible in Afghanistan, how come the [international donor countries] themselves use [such] technology? Afghanistan is not on another planet […].” He said that Afghans were very adaptive to new technology.

A Feasibility Study Team was appointed in March (4) and issued its final report on 17 April 2017 (which AAN has seen) that concluded: First, it was unfeasible “to introduce new digital election technology for an election in November 2017” – the target date given by the government. Second, it strongly recommended shelving the idea of electronic voting until after the next parliamentary elections and recommended: only a partial use of technology “[w]ith a longer time horizon, including a potential election day in spring 2018 or later,” which included “biometric voter registration, biometric voter verification, and electronic result processing.” Third, the report suggested: “biometric registration in some areas” could be still complemented with “other, simpler measures”, in order not to disenfranchise those “citizens that cannot be reached as part of the initial biometric registration drive.” The Feasibility Study Team also referred to “new legal requirements for assigning voters to polling centres, and the poor state of the existing register”, which results from article six of the new electoral law; this article is about voter registration, calls for the registration of all eligible voters in a voters list and obliges the voters to vote at the same polling centres where they are originally registered. (5) These requirements, the team concluded, necessitated “a new, credible voter register”, which it said was “a priority area for the use of technology.”

The report provided “basic estimations” about the timeframe for “a biometric voter registration exercise”, which it said would take “at least nine months to a year from decisionmaking [sic]: 3 months for specification and tendering for equipment; 3 months for production of equipment, shipment to country; 2 – 4 months for registration exercise, depending on operational plan; 1 month duplication and voter list production.” It said that the estimation was “a best-case scenario” and that delays should be “expected and adequate time buffers need to be included in the final operational plan.”

The findings of the Feasibility Study Team corresponded with the recommendations by the Special Electoral Reform Commission (SERC) (which was appointed in 2015 to review the electoral laws and institutions and recommend electoral reforms as part of the NUG’s political agreement in December 2015 (see AAN’s previous reports here and here). After listing the advantages of using technology in electoral processes, such as helping to prevent duplication in voter registration, multiple voting and accelerating safe data transfer from polling centres to the IEC headquarters, the SERC recommended that “the government, considering all aspects related to this subject, such as the possibilities of procuring required machines and their maintenance, public awareness, training of election staff for launching electronic voting and the infrastructural possibilities of the country, conducts the voter registration process electronically and use of technology in other phases of elections be incorporated into mid-term and long-term programmes [our Italics].”

IEC decides for full use of technology

Contrary to the above recommendations, the IEC announced that it had decided to use technology in all phases of elections, including voter registration, voter verification, voting, vote counting and result transmission. This happened during a consultative meeting with representatives of political parties and civil society organisations on 26 April 2017 (which was also attended by the author). Maleha Hassan, a member of the IEC, told the participants that the full use of technology “will be like a revolution in Afghanistan, […] we need to use technology.” She dismissed the recommendations of the Feasibility Study Team as having been only “conducted by three foreigners and one Afghan” who, she said “may not know well about Afghanistan” and might not have researched “properly.” She said that “the electoral law is the only basis for the IEC decisions,” despite the fact the law does not particularly prescribe anything about use of technology.

IEC secretary and spokesman Gula Jan Badi Sayyad also argued that the use of technology was about trust building. He said in “countries like Afghanistan, where there is a lack of trust, transparency and there is fraud” and where “people need to find something to ensure trust and prevent fraud” needed to use them. Similarly, on 2 May 2017, IEC secretariat head, Warimach, said in the Senate, “the commission, after reviewing the use of technology, has come to this conclusion that it has the capacity for full use of it and is going to hold the next parliamentary elections electronically.” Government officials (such as the second vice-president Sarwar Danesh, in a meeting with the UN Special Representative for Afghanistan on 1 May 2017) also continued to press for the use of technology.

This ambitious decision, to fully utilise technology, disregarded the recommendations based on technical studies conducted by SERC and Feasibility Study Team regarding what was feasible and practical which was: only biometric voter registration and verification for the next parliamentary elections.

The IEC fails to secure a successful procurement

Both the restricted tendering method and the procurement process were criticised by Afghan election observers. FEFA’s Rashid questioned why the restricted tendering method was used in the first place, despite the fact that the commission had enough time to use open tendering method) Sughra Sadat of Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA) implied that, even this restricted tendering was not conducted transparently, when she told AAN on 12 September 2017 that “TEFA talked to a couple of the companies, including SmartMatic, that were requested to provide proposals for biometric machines. The two companies said that they were notified at the last minute when the deadline was about to close.”

The IEC under fire on 10 October 2017 announced in a press release that, based on the report of its evaluation committee, the offer submitted by the Prologix had fallen short of the set criteria and that, based on the procurement law and rules of procedure, the offer failed “to go to the detailed evaluation phase.” The IEC further declared that the offer by the company was “irresponsive [not fulfilling the functional criteria specified by the IEC in the request for proposal]” and referred it back to the NPC “for further processing”. This, in effect, meant a new tendering process is required.

This is how Plan B could look like again. Photo: Thomas Ruttig (2010)

Plan B: back to manual voter registration?

On 29 October 2017, Tolonews quoted IEC deputy head Wasima Badghisi as saying that, the paper-based elections for the next parliament seemed more feasible. Two days later, IEC spokesman Sayyad explained to AAN that the IEC was working on an alternative plan to conduct voter registration manually, should its “Plan A” for biometric voter registration encounter any problems. According to an electoral roadmap prepared by the IEC (AAN has seen a copy of it), if the BVR equipment is not available by October 2017 (which has not happened), it would affect the other steps in the process, given the approaching onset of winter. The previous IEC in its unrealistic plan for elections on the 16 October 2016 had set four months for the revalidation of existing cards and the registration of Afghans who, for some reason, needed new cards. A new voter registration would certainly take more time (see also this AAN’s previous dispatch here).

According to Sayyad, the NPC had not sent out a new request for proposal for BVR equipment as of 31 October 2017. This has now been forsaken as, on 22 November 2017, Maleha Hassan told AAN that there would not be any procurement process for biometric machines this time, as it would take time. This came after deputy head of the IEC for operations, Wasima Badghisi, also said on 20 November 2017 that their plan for biometric voter registration “was not supported sufficiently by international organisations and the government of Afghanistan and this might remain as a long-term plan and if we receive these supports, we may use it in 2019 presidential elections.” She further said that the discussion was to “make [only] partial use of electronic system in preparing voter lists, but its full use is a weak possibility.” In fact, blaming the international donors and the government about elections technology, the IEC has now started to implement its Plan B. This falls back on use of a paper-based system to register voters, but still link them to the polling centres registration. On 27 November, IEC spokesman Sayyad confirmed to AAN that the IEC had decided to conduct paper-based voter registration based on Tazkera and that the IEC had already signed a memorandum of understanding with Population Registration Department based on which it committed to issue tazkera to eligible voters so the IEC can use it to register voters. According to him, this also reduces the budget, but the IEC is still preparing an estimated budget plan in accordance with Plan B.

Conclusion

The IEC officially sticks to the 7 July 2018 date for the next parliamentary elections (we will discuss district council elections in a separate dispatch), but has already signalled flexibility. AAN has heard from various stakeholders that fall-back dates as late as October 2018 are being considered.

Despite the problems outlined here (and we will soon write about further aspects of necessary preparations), it appears that the IEC will keep struggling to still hold elections in 2018. One of the remaining shortcomings is that the Afghan government insists that it does not have the financial ability to finance elections alone and, thus, needs the support of the international donors. They have continued to be reluctant as they were concerned, not only about the feasibility of technological solutions, but also about their ownership, sustainability and credibility in Afghanistan. They also set conditions, such as: proper use of IEC and ECC assets (addressing questions about the assets taken by the former commissioners (see this media report about the IEC assets taken by the former IEC members); and, a proper budget and operational plan.

Much time was lost as a result of the president’s ambitious desire to introduce, not only biometric voter registration, but also electronic voting. Recommendations by a number of feasibility studies have been overruled, and an unsuccessful and problematic procurement process for this technology has added fuel to the fire. The IEC saw itself as being forced now to fall back on Plan B: to use a manual system for voter registration and to develop a more reliable voter list that, for the first time, ties each voter to a specific polling centre. This was a major demand of electoral reform, which has been enshrined in the electoral law. This also reduces the election budget. However, it remains to be seen whether this new manual voter registration can lay a solid foundation for improving the system that could be built upon by using biometric technology in the run-up to the next cycle of elections.

Postscript: The selection of a new IEC chairman

The sacking of the IEC chairman, Najibullah Ahmadzai, by the president on 15 November 2017 (see AAN’s previous report here has necessitated the selection of a new IEC commissioner to replace him. (The commissioners will elect the new chairman from amongst themselves.)

In this situation, according to the Electoral Law, President Ghani was supposed to appoint a new commissioner from amongst the 14 remaining candidates suggested by a selection committee in 2016 for the IEC within two weeks’ time. The IEC, in its new composition, would then elect a new chairman from among themselves. (7) However, he argued that none of the candidates were sufficiently qualified and, as a result, decreed that the former selection committee should reconvene (see its composition in footnote (8) and more about its previous work here).

Acting presidential spokesman Shah Hussain Murtazawi informed about this decree in a statement published on Facebook on 26 November. The decree came into force with immediate effect. Murtazawi’s statement also repeated the argument about the absence of an eligible candidate. Here AAN’s working translation from Dari:

Considering the importance of elections as a national process and the need for the competent and experienced individuals for better conduct of it [elections] and because an eligible person for membership of the Independent Election Commission could not be appointed from among the list of remaining candidates, the leadership of the National Unity Government has made a decision to issue a decree on the start of the Selection Committee’s work.

The president’s argument was read by many observers of the Afghan election process as a statement in favour of Abdullah Ahmadzai, currently the head of the country office of The Asia Foundation. His name has regularly emerged as a strong candidate for the job and whom key international stakeholders also support. Abdullah Ahmadzai served as the head of the IEC Secretariat for the 2010 parliamentary elections. These elections had been marred by serious shortcomings and followed by more than a year-long aftermath that was badly managed and controversial until finally results were accepted. AAN then concluded that this vote had been sacrificed “for a semblance of control”) (see here and more AAN analysis here). His name was not on the 2016 shortlist of 21 names submitted by the selection committee for the initial IEC.

This decision to reconvene the selection committee immediately created some opposition, including from among members of the committee. Yusuf Rashid, a member of the (former) selection committee argued, as reported by Afghan media that there was “no legal justification for the committee to resume its work.” This was echoed by the chairman of one of the Afghan election watchdog organisations, Jandad Spinghar from Election Watch Afghanistan (EWA), (9) as well as in a statement from The Election & Transparency Watch Organization of Afghanistan (ETWA) published on 26 November. ETWA even suggested that, in order to solve the issue of IEC succession, the Election Law should be amended “in consultation with political parties and civil society.” This would lead to a lengthy process, further extending the preparation period for the elections.

 

(1) Article 83 of the constitution sets out:

Members of the House of People shall be elected by the people through free, general, secret and direct balloting. The work period of the House of People shall terminate, after the disclosure of the results of the elections, on the 1st of Saratan of the fifth year and the new parliament shall commence work. The elections for members of the House of People shall be held 30-60 days prior to the expiration of the term of the House of People. The number of the members of the House of People shall be proportionate to the population of each constituency, not exceeding the maximum of two hundred fifty individuals. Electoral constituencies as well as other related issues shall be determined by the elections law. The elections law shall adopt measures to attain, through the electorate system, general and fair representation for all the people of the country, and proportionate to the population of every province, on average, at least two females shall be the elected members of the House of People from each province.

(2) The UNDP-ELECT, since its launch in 2006, has been “the preferred basket for donors to contribute to, both for UN support to the IEC and for its ongoing daily costs” (quoted from here). The ELECT project has served both as a main basket and vehicle for international financial support for the electoral processes and provider of international technical support to the electoral bodies. This continued until 2012 when it was replaced by UNDP-ELECT II, which provided direct support to the IEC, as well as ECC from 2012 to mid-2015. Since then, it has been replaced by the Transitional Support to Elections in Afghanistan Project Initiation Plan (PIP). PIP was intended “to bridge the period between the operational closure of the ELECT II project on 31 July 2015, and the signing of a new project document, defining the terms and modalities of future electoral support, to be implemented partnership with” NUG.  Starting from January 2018, PIP would be replaced by United Nations Electoral Support Project (UNESP).

(3) On 18 April 2017, for instance, Jandad Spinghar, the head of Elections Watch Afghanistan (EWA) said on TV, “There is a company called Smart Matic which has come into this country in 2015 and has met the president, the chief executive, the leaders and us and everyone. I mean that the company is trying to do a type of marketing. It has been to the commissions for [trying to persuade them into] buying the technology.”

(4) The exact date of the appointment is not clear. Naem Ayubzada, the head of TEFA, who was a member of the team, in a conversation with AAN did not remember the exact date and said that it worked for one month. If true, it might have been established on 17 March.

The report also does not say anything about who ordered the feasibility study and says:

“In support of an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned electoral process, the IEC, the government and the international partners have agreed that an independent feasibility study should be conducted prior to the introduction of technology.”

Ayubzada told AAN that the Ministry of Finance had sent a letter to the IEC, which then coordinated the feasibility study.

According to the report, the Feasibility Study Team was composed of the following members:

• Mr. Peter Wolf (Austria): a technical manager with International Institute for Democracy and International Assistance (IDEA) with the expertise in elections, constitution-building, and ICTs in elections.
• Mr. Naeem Ayubzada (Afghanistan): the head of TEFA, a domestic election observer organization,which has observed 2009 presidential, 2010 parliamentary and 2014 presidential elections.
• Ms. Mareska Mantik (Indonesia): electoral capacity building specialist with experience of working with UNDP.
• Mr. Kåre Vollan (Norway): an international electoral expert assisting the Election Commission of Nepal on law issues and providing advice to the Constitutional Assembly members.

The report further said that “Technical staff of the IEC participated for technical support upon the request of the team and approval of the Vice Chairman – Operations who was directly in charge of the overall management and coordination of the study.”

(5) Article six of the electoral law says about registration and voting:

1 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 Tazkera or document specified by the Commission for verification of his/her identity.

2 No person can register his/her name more than once in the voters list.

3 The voter is obliged to vote at the poling center, where his/her name has already been registered in the voters list of that polling center.

4 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.

6 Every voter has the right of one vote and can use it directly in favor of his/her favorite candidate. (6) 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.

(6) According to rule 21 of the rules of procurement procedure, an entity can “use the restricted tendering procurement method where; 1) the goods, works and services are only available from a limited number of bidders (maximum 5 references). 2) The use of open tendering is not practicable, due to unforeseeable and urgent circumstances or delays in procurement process because of dilatory, negligence or un-accurate planning of the Entity” (the Dari version of the procedure is available here. (Dari version here).

The IEC and NPC used the second justification for choosing the restricted tendering method.

(7) See paragraph 2 of Article 14 of this law. The whole article reads:

Conditions of Termination of the Member of the Commission

Article 16:

1      A member of the Commission can be terminated from job in the following circumstances:

1.1-      Faking of the educational documents.

1.2-      Deprivation of civil rights on the order of a competent court.

1.3-      Conviction for committing crimes of misdemeanor or felony.

1.4-      Having membership in political parties during membership of the Commission.

1.5-      Breaching provisions of the Constitution of Afghanistan, this law and other laws enforced in the country.

1.6-      Suffering from an incurable or long-lasting disease which impedes performance of duties.

1.7-      Continuous absence from job for more than twenty days without justifiable legal reasons.

1.8-      Non-observance of provisions of Article 17 of this law.

2      Member of the Commission may tender his/her resignation in written to the president.

3      In case of resignation, termination or death of one or more members of the Commission, the President, within seven days, shall appoint new member (s) from amongst the remaining candidates stipulated in paragraph (2) of the Article (14) of this law; with due consideration to the ethnic and gender composition.

4      In case the chairperson, deputy chairperson or secretary of the Commission lose their membership due to resignation, termination or death, new elections shall be conducted among the members of the Commission, in accordance with the paragraph (2) of the Article (11) of this law.

5      Except for the conditions mentioned in sections (1, 2 and 3) of the paragraph (1) of this article, determination of other conditions shall take place by the Commission.

Based on Article 16.3 of the same law, in the described case (or in the case of resignation or death of an IEC member) the president should appoint a new member from the list of the remaining candidates introduced by the selection committee. Article 16.4 says that if the dismissed (or resigned or deceased) member is also the chairman or deputy chairman or secretary of the IEC, there should be a new internal election in the IEC (see here).

(8) The selection committee comprises of the following members: 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.

(9) The article we cite Spinghar’s position from wrongly associates him with another organisation, FEFA.

 

 

 

 

Hezb-e Islami has run into a legal conflict over registration. This hampers efforts to re-unite the party’s various factions after the return of its ‘historical’ leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and in the run-up to the elections planned for 2018. It also reflects internal dynamics between a more pragmatic wing of Hezb-e Islami, which is participating in government, and the ex-insurgent faction led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is struggling to re-assert full control over the party. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig looks into the details and implications (with research by Ali Muhammad Sabawoon).

Hezb-e Islami, a major former mujahedin party that recently made a comeback on the political stage, has run into unexpected trouble. One of its factions, which has operated in Afghanistan since 2005, has refused to fully and publicly commit to party unity following the return of the party’s historical leader, who is trying to regain his grip on it.

The issue of party unity had featured high on the agenda of a large-scale gathering (media report here) held between 8 and 10 November 2017 in Kabul and chaired by Hezb’s historical leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. It was also a major theme in Hekmatyar’s opening speech. The conference was designed to mark the party’s transition from being one of the post-2001 insurgent groups to a united, political actor on the national scene. But the Hezb wing led by former economy minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal has so far refused to follow. Both sides say negotiations are ongoing.

Hekmatyar returned to the country in May 2017 (AAN background here), after he concluded a peace deal with the government in the name of his party in September 2016 (AAN analysis here). Following the peace deal, several factions of Hezb that had emerged during the party’s post-2001 split into an insurgent wing and several factions politically active in Afghanistan (AAN background here) had committed to reuniting under the party’s historical name Hezb-e Islami-ye Afghanistan (HIA; Islamic Party of Afghanistan) with Hekmatyar as the party’s amir (leader).

At the conference, Hekmyatyar did not speak of “factions” but of “different offices and addresses” that needed to be re-united in an “organisational renewal.” He added that the groups under these ‘addresses’ had committed to “close their doors as soon as a central office of the party was established” which now was the case. Hekmatyar mentioned two of these factions, namely the faction that had been led, until recently, by the late Khaled Faruqi, (1) and the Union of Hezb-e Islami Councils (more about these groups in this AAN dispatch). This leaves Arghandiwal’s faction and the United Islamic Party, led by Wahidullah Sabawun, still outside the party. (Hekmatyar did not mention either by name.) Sabawun told AAN on 25 November that he had not participated in Hekmatyar’s congress, continues to run his own party and “for the time being” does not intend to join Hekmatyar.

Representatives of Hekmatyar’s wing told AAN that a Memorandum of Understanding had been signed by the leaders of all factions after the conclusion of the peace deal. Hezb Central Council spokesman Fazl Minullah Mumtaz told AAN, that “all had agreed that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is the party’s amir and that Hezb is united, without any factionalism. Arghandiwal has also signed this agreement.” Mumtaz declined to share a copy with AAN, but Abdul Jabbar Shelgarai, a member of the Arghandiwal group (and advisor to Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah), confirmed to AAN that his group considers Hekmatyar “the accepted leader of the people of Afghanistan and the leader of Hezb-e Islami.”

The dissidents’ position

On 9 November, Arghandiwal told Radio Azadi, the Afghan service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, that “until now, unity has not come” and that he “hoped that an agreement could be reached.” He also pointed out that Hezb was registered under his name with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). This was interpreted by observers as a bargaining chip in an attempt to avoid handing over full control of the party to Hekmatyar. Arghandiwal added that he would accept “anyone who is elected leader by Hezb”. A leader was not, however, elected at the November gathering.

An MoJ spokesman was quoted as confirming on 13 November that a party by the name of Hezb-e Islami had already been registered by Arghandiwal, and that the activity of Hekmatyar’s wing “could be illegal”. This statement was quickly retracted. (Incidentally, the current justice minister, Abdul Bassir Anwar, is a member of Arghandiwal’s Hezb faction.) Hezb/Hekmatyar spokesman Mumtaz had immediately countered it, arguing that the National Unity Government (NUG) had concluded the peace agreement with Hezb-e Islami-ye Afghanistan under this name, indirectly suggesting that this implied the NUG’s recognition of Hekmatyar’s faction.

While there was no full leadership election at the 8-10 November Kabul conference, a number of other party positions were filled. Nader Afghan, a Hezb/Hekmatyar spokesman, told AAN that the 3,000 participants of the conference elected the High Central Council consisting of 500 persons which, in turn, elected among them a 100-member High Decision-Making Council (De tasmim ali shura) that, between congresses, would take all decisions concerning the party (see also here). This council would have to elect a 15-member Executive Council (De ejraiye shura). The candidates for membership would be introduced to the Decision-Making Council by the party leader. “The announcement of the election for leadership of the party and the provincial leaders will also be the job of the executive committee,” he added.

Nonetheless, there was no word at the conference about the election of the party’s amir. The party’s constitution (asas-nama), however, also provides for the amir to be elected in a “free, direct and secret vote (…) with the participation of the party’s officials and members.” According to this document (in the author’s archive), the amir is responsible to the party’s central council.

Arghandiwal was absent from the Kabul conference (see media report here), as were other leading Hezb politicians who had been active in Afghanistan for years before Hekmatyar’s return. This included Maulawi Ataullah Ludin, who as an MP between 2005 and 2010 was considered Hezb’s parliamentary leader (he also was a deputy head of the High Peace Council and governor in his home province Nangrahar); Abdulrauf Ibrahimi, the current speaker of the Wolesi Jirga; Eng Muhammad Khan, the second deputy Chief Executive; MPs Eqbal Safi (Kapisa) and Haji Almas (Parwan); former minister Naser Durrani; and leadership members Mawlawi Sarferaz and justice minister Anwar.

Shelgari told AAN that they had not attended the conference because some of their ideas for the party’s reunification “were not accepted” and they had not reached an agreement by the opening of the congress. Officials of both sides told AAN they were not able to share what the conflict is about in detail. A member of Arghandiwal’s office, however, told AAN on the condition of anonymity that there were still a number of armed people present in Hekmatyar’ group who continue to participate in the insurgency, which was “against Afghanistan’s political parties law.”

Hezb and disarmament

AAN has reported previously that “Hezb-e Islami has been a fading insurgent group in recent years” due to a “shortage of resources and a near-absence of central command which could supply [its] fighters and provide reinforcements.”

But some Hezb commanders are still active at a local level. Despite a ceasefire declared by the Hezb leadership in September 2016, some have refused to lay down their arms, for example in Laghman, Baghlan and Maidan-Wardak; read also here and see this video, in Pashto, from an undisclosed location, likely in Eastern Afghanistan).

Over several months, Afghan media reported on the “tyranny” of a Hezb-e Islami commander, Bashir Qanet, in Takhar’s Chah Ab district (here and here) against whom reportedly an arrest warrant had been issued after an attack on a gathering in a local mosque, which resulted in four people killed and nearly 30 others injured. The province’s police chief had told Afghan media that Qanet had 1,000 militia men under his command and that the “police have no capability to detain him.” In a Hezb statement, quoted here, Hekmatyar did not disown the commander. According to another media report, Roqiya Nayel, an MP from Ghor province, has alleged that Hekmatyar’s party illegally distributed hundreds of weapons in less than a year to loyal followers and that armed men affiliated to Hekmatyar walked freely in the province’s centre, Chaghcharan. She urged the government to interdict the armed men who have repeatedy harried the province’s civilian population.

There were also reports of land grabbing and illegal mining by Hezb commanders in Baghlan.

In August, Hekmatyar had reportedly stated that the disarmament of his party’s fighters was currently “not on the government’s agenda” and that the fighters would keep their weapons until the government’s security forces were able to ensure their security. This position has been confirmed by Ahmad Farzan, the official responsible for the post-peace deal disarmament in the High Peace Council secretariat.

At the same time, there were allegations of Hezb members being killed in northern Afghanistan as a result of “collusion” between local officials and the Taleban. Indeed, a number of Hezb commanders have been assassinated, for example in Baghlan and in Logar. Also, a former secretary of Hekmatyar was killed in Peshawar in what could have been tit-for-tat killings between Hezb and the Taleban.

Key Hekmatyar positions at the party conference

The exact status of Hezb’s Kabul gathering remains unclear. Was it a full-scale party congress, to be held frequently according to the party’s constitution, including new elections for a new party leadership after Hekmatyar’s return, bringing in all factions that existed inside Afghanistan before? Or was it something lesser, albeit still significant as the party’s first convocation to be held in the country after Hekmatyar’s return and the peace deal? The official title of the event was “De stere markazi shura tarikhi ghunda” (the High Central Council’s historical gathering).

The conference attracted widespread attention and was discussed in the Afghan public and the media that ran some relatively short articles. At the same time, it was severely underreported, including by Hezb’s own media, and few details about what was discussed and what was decided have emerged. Hezb’s main newspaper Shahadat only carried a short report about the opening day and then ran less than three lines about each of the following two days (see example here) (2); Hezb had announced in advance, however, that two of the three days would be closed to the public. (Hekmatyar’s speech on day one can be found on Youtube.) Drawing on these reports and the speech we summarise those areas of debate at the Kabul meeting most relevant for the current political discussion in Afghanistan.

On elections

In his opening speech at the conference, Hekmatyar supported the holding of parliamentary and district council elections on the date envisaged so far, on 7 July 2018 (see AAN analysis). He criticised attempts to postpone the polls; a number of political parties, he alleged, feared his party and were trying to create hurdles for the elections. He demanded a redrawing of the electoral constituencies and called for the country’s ‘more than four million refugees’ to be granted the right to vote. He said further that “foreigners should not interfere in the elections,” but could “oversee [the process].” Before the conference, the party had suggested that, “instead of changing figures and appointing new officials” in the electoral commissions, a council should be formed from political party representatives and other influential figures to oversee the elections process.

Hekmatyar reportedly told his supporters that the next elections would “bring a basic change in the country’s destiny.”

On the political system

Hekmatyar declared his party’s support for the current government, adding there was no proper alternative to replace it – distancing himself from other political forces demanding an interim government (AAN background here). He also reiterated its commitment to the 2016 peace agreement with the government and called on the Taleban to follow this example.

He added that “if the Taleban agree to talks, we will support all their legitimate and reasonable demands.“

On the ‘ethnic character’ of the current war

Hekmatyar’s statements about the allegedly ethnic character of the current fighting created, in particular, a hot public debate including widespread condemnation, among others, in the media, a presidential spokesman, the Chief Executive and number of MPs and political commentators (media reporting here). Afghan ToloNews quoted him as saying:

War is ongoing in every part of Afghanistan. This is the war which continued in the past. A big number of Ghor residents are involved in this war. Sit with them and ask them who is involved in this war? It is between two ethnic groups! In Taiwara, the conflict is not between security forces and insurgents; it is between two ethnic groups. It is the same in Kunduz, in Baghlan, in all northern parts of the country. The real situation of the war is like this across the country.

Hekmatyar called such reports “misinterpretations” and accused the media of working in the interest of foreigners and Hezb’s enemies.

Conclusion

Arghandiwal’s public refusal to join hands with and subordinate himself to Hekmatyar before the much promoted Kabul party conference was an embarrassment for the party amir, known for his “absolutist leadership style” (AAN background here). The Hezb leadership around Hekmatyar has obviously underestimated the depth of the differences between its own ex-insurgent wing and the veteran party leaders who had participated in the governments of presidents Hamed Karzai and Ashraf Ghani as well as carrying out duties as provincial and district governors or sitting in parliament. (3) Indeed, Arghandiwal’s faction had made its peace with the former main mujahedin rival, Jamiat-e Islami, and joined a coalition around its candidate Abdullah Abdullah, the current government’s Chief Executive, while Hekmatyar still considers Jamiat a rival.

Four long-time Afghan observers of the country’s political scene told AAN that above and beyond the members and sympathisers of Hezb, Pashtuns in particular had hoped that Hekmatyar’s return would bring about positive changes to the political system – but now widely feel let down. The observers explained, using almost similar language, that the myth of the absent guerrilla leader Hekmatyar had been punctured by his statements on the ‘ethnic character’ of the war as it reflected a mind stuck in war-time factional thinking. One also said that, in the eyes of many Afghans, he has dropped his often-repeated position that he would only return to the country after foreign troops had left. (Later he modified this to the demand that there should be a timetable for their withdrawal.) In comparison, they agreed, the Arghandiwal faction represented – as one of them put it – a “more moderate tendency within Hezb” and the larger Islamist movement.

Hekmatyar’s and Arghandiwal’s factions are now trying to play down their rift in public and keep cards close to their chests. But the rift clearly hampers efforts to re-unite the party’s various factions under its ‘historical’ leader, Hekmatyar, who has explicitly set course on winning the next parliamentary elections.

How the party conference – or congress? – was handled and how the elections of Hezb’s leading bodies were conducted (or not) is not untypical for Afghanistan’s political parties. There is a general lack of transparency of how they determine their leadership bodies or leaders – namely behind closed doors and through a succession of limited councils, not by a general election of elected delegates to a congress. The leader principle still dominates. (As Kabul daily Hasht-e Sobh quipped in its 5 November issue, Arghandiwal’s party has also failed to hold a congress since being elected leader by a party council in mid-2006.)

The potential legal conflict over who is the registered leader of Hezb also points to another weakness of the political system in Afghanistan. Although political parties have not been given a visible role in it, they are mobilisation platforms for individual leaders who would ‘delegate’ members into political offices as Afghan governments tend to be, all but officially, coalition governments that involve party representatives. (This is particularly the case with the NUG, whose twin camps – that of President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah – are coalitions in their own right.) As a result, now a ministry led by a member of one of the two quarrelling Hezb factions might find itself in the situation, if Hekmatyar and Arghandiwal do not find a compromise, where it has to decide on the legality of their claims. This is clearly a conflict of interest that could have easily been avoided if one of the long-standing recommendations for the reform of the Afghan electoral institutions had been heeded: to put party registration under a neutral body. (4)

 

(1) Faruqi was the first leader of the Hezb-e Islami wing registered in post-Taleban Afghanistan, but replaced by Arghandiwal in 2007 as a result of a party conference. He did not recognise this change of leadership and continued separate political activities with his supporters.

(2) There are currently two versions of Shahadat. The print version that officially appears on a weekly basis, but in practice more irregularly, is run by the Arghandiwal faction. The online version that is updated daily is controlled by supporters of Hekmatyar. The Arghandiwal group also publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Shafaq.

(3) According to government statistics seen by AAN, Hezb (both factions) won 18 per cent of the seats in the 2017 elections for the three-member leadership bodies of the 34 Provincial Councils (these elections are held annually), making it the second strongest by this count, after its long-time rival, Jamiat-e Islami (20 per cent).

(4) See this recommendation repeated in a 2015 USIP assessment (here, p3).

On 20 November, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) finally published her request to open a formal investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan. This means that the Prosecutor agrees with the result of the preliminary examination showing that crimes meeting the ICC gravity threshold have been committed in Afghanistan since 2003 (the period for which the ICC has jurisdiction) and that the ICC considers that Afghanistan is either unwilling or unable to prosecute these crimes nationally. The Prosecutor also made an open request to the victims to send their statements to the Court by 31 January 2018. There is, then, a very important but short window of opportunity for victims to share their stories with the Court. On the occasion of the release of the Prosecutor’s request, AAN is publishing this question and answers dispatch focusing on the ICC and Afghanistan (1).

THE ICC IN GENERAL

1.  What is the International Criminal Court?

The ICC is an independent, permanent court established in 2002 to investigate and prosecute the following international crimes: genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

2. What are war crimes and crimes against humanity?

War crimes are certain acts that violate international rules on how armed conflict must be conducted. Crimes against humanity are serious human rights abuses committed against civilians on a widespread and systematic scale.  They are sometimes called atrocity crimes, and, unlike war crimes, they can be committed at any time, not just during armed conflict. Some examples of these crimes are torture and cruel treatment (such as abuse in detention), intentional killing of civilians, and attacks on places such as schools, hospitals and mosques. Making these actions crimes means that individuals who ordered or perpetrated them can be held criminally accountable.  They are called international crimes because they are thought to be so shocking that dealing with them should be the business of the whole world and not the state where the crimes were committed.     

3. How was the ICC established?

The Court was created by an international treaty known as the Rome Statute. It came into existence on July 1, 2002, after 60 states—the minimum number required—ratified the Statute. States that have ratified the Rome Statute (at present, 123 states have done so) are legally obligated to cooperate with the Court.

4. When did Afghanistan join the ICC?

The government of Afghanistan ratified the Rome Statute in 2003, so the ICC can investigate Rome Statute crimes committed by Afghans or on Afghanistan’s territory from May 1, 2003 onwards. The Rome Statute was adopted in the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court in 1998, also with Afghan involvement. The Afghan Mujaheddin Government, officially the Islamic State of Afghanistan, sent a delegation, which was led by current Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, to thecConference. That time Abdullah Abdullah was the Deputy of Foreign Affairs Ministry.

5. Who can the ICC investigate?

The Court can investigate individuals, not states or corporations. The Rome Statute does not recognise immunity for any person, even heads of state or government officials. In other countries where the ICC has intervened there have been arrest warrants issued against presidents and high level officials such as heads of intelligence agencies, as well as the leaders of armed groups.

6. Where can the ICC investigate?

The Court has jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of a country that has signed the Rome Statute, or crimes by citizens of countries that have ratified the Rome Statute. (This means that even though the United States has not ratified the Rome Statute its citizens can be investigated for crimes committed in Afghanistan since 2003). The Court can also investigate in countries that have not ratified the Rome Statute, but this requires a UN Security Council referral. 

7. Where else has the ICC investigated?

To date, the ICC has opened ten investigations in nine countries: Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo; the Central African Republic (where two separate investigations are underway); Darfur, Sudan; Kenya; Côte d’Ivoire; Libya; Mali; and Georgia.

8. What triggers an investigation by the Court?

There are three ways that the ICC gets involved. First, a country that has ratified the Rome Statute can refer a situation for investigation; secondly, the UN Security Council can refer a situation (as it has done in Libya and Sudan); thirdly, the Prosecutor can seek to initiate an investigation in countries that have ratified the Rome Statute. This is what has happened in Afghanistan.

9. What is the ICC’s relationship to national courts?

The ICC operates according to the principle of complementarity, which recognises that states have the main responsibility to investigate and prosecute crimes committed in their territories or by their nationals. This means that the Court can only investigate when a state is not already investigating or prosecuting the same individual in a similar case, or is unable or unwilling to do so.

10. How does the ICC enforce its decisions?

The Court does not have its own police force; it relies on state cooperation to enforce arrest warrants and comply with rulings. Other countries that are members of the Court also have a duty to cooperate – including enforcing arrest warrants.

11. How long has the ICC been involved in Afghanistan?

The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the ICC started a preliminary examination in Afghanistan at least as long ago as 2006, when it was made public. A preliminary examination comes before a formal investigation and allows the prosecutor to decide if the suspected crimes fit its mandate. The examination also includes assessing whether the national government is doing enough to investigate and prosecute domestically.

THE ICC’s INVESTIGATION IN AFGHANISTAN 

12. What was the result of the ICC Preliminary Examination into the Situation in Afghanistan?

The preliminary examination into crimes committed in Afghanistan lasted almost a decade. The ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) released its 2016 Preliminary Examination Report on Afghanistan (released annually) on 14 November 2016. The report stated that the OTP had determined that there was a reasonable basis to believe that, at a minimum, the following crimes within the Court’s jurisdiction had occurred:

• Crimes against humanity and war crimes by the Taleban and their affiliate, the Haqqani Network
• War crimes of torture and related ill-treatment by Afghan government forces, in particular the intelligence agency (National Directorate for Security) and the Afghan National Police;
• War crimes of torture and related ill-treatment, by US military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, principally in the 2003-2004 period, although allegedly continuing in some cases until 2014.

The Preliminary Examination also said that thresholds of admissibility had been reached, ie the alleged crimes under ICC jurisdiction are sufficiently grave, are not being addressed by domestic or other legal bodies (although this is “subject to further information that could be provided by the relevant national authorities in the course of the preliminary examination or any subsequent investigation”) and there are “no substantial reasons to believe that the opening of an investigation would not be in the interests of justice.”

The Preliminary Examination was initiated by the ICC Prosecutor and not requested by Afghanistan or the United Nations Security Council, which means under the Court’s rules that, once the Prosecutor has determined that there is a case or cases to answer, there has to be an additional, preliminary judgement by a panel of judges from the Pre-Trial Chamber. The judges will review the Prosecutor’s request, as well as all the supporting evidence, to ensure that an investigation is merited.

13. What has the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor done about the situation in Afghanistan based on the Preliminary Examination?

On 30 October 2017 the ICC Prosecutor notified the Presidency of the ICC of her readiness to submit her request to the Pre-Trial Chamber of the ICC seeking judicial authorisation to commence an investigation into the situation in Afghanistan. On 3 November 2017, the Prosecutor announced that she was submitting her request to the Pre-Trial Chamber. On the same day the Presidency established the Pre-Trial Chamber III to deal with the Prosecutor’s request concerning the situation in Afghanistan.

On 20 November, the Prosecutor announced that she had submitted her request, seeking authorisation to commence a full investigation into the situation in Afghanistan, to the Pre-Trial Chamber III of the Court. According to this lengthy, 181-page request, all legal criteria for commencement of an investigation exist (AAN’s analysis about these legal criteria and the OTP’s arguments concerning them: see here).

On the same day, 20 November, the Prosecutor also released a notification on the ICC website where she said:

By this notice, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, informs victims of alleged crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan in the period of alleged crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan in the period since 1 May 2003, as well as victims of other alleged crimes that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan and were committed on the territory of other States Parties in the period since 1 July 2002, […].

The Prosecutor’s notice to victims follows an order issued by the three judges of the Pre-Trial Chamber on 9 November 2017 concerning the issue of victims’ representations. According to this order, war victims “may” submit their representations to the Registry of the ICC until 31 of January 2018. For this purpose, the Registry of the ICC developed special forms in local languages, namely Dari and Pashto, as well as English – although victims can use any format and languages they are comfortable with. The victims can also send their messages to the ICC as audio and video files. The Prosecutor was obliged in the order to notify the victims known to her via public notice by general means. Victims’ engagement with the ICC is voluntary and they are not obliged to prove their claims. The victims can submit their representation individually or collectively.

14. What happens now? What will an investigation in Afghanistan entail?

The prosecutor has now asked the judges (the “pre-trial chamber”) for authorization to open an investigation. The judges will consider the material gathered by the prosecutor, but will also invite victims to tell the judges what happened to them and whether they want the ICC to investigate. This is an important but very short window for victims to be heard; it lasts from now until January 31, 2018 (See 16 below).

A decision from the judges or the pre-trial chamber can be expected within three to six months. If permission to investigate is granted, the real investigation begins thereafter. When the real investigation starts, the Prosecutor and her team have much more power to gather information.

15. Who are likely to be investigated by the ICC in Afghanistan?

Three main groups have been identified by the Prosecutor:

–       the Taleban and affiliated armed groups

–       Afghan government forces

–       the United States military and Central Intelligence Agency

According to information received by the OTP thus far, over 17,000 civilian deaths between January 2007 and December 2015 could be attributed to anti-government armed groups such as the Taleban. The report also highlights attacks by the Taleban against schools, hospitals, mosques and humanitarian organisations (which are “protected objects” under international law). In the case of criminal conduct by US forces and Afghan government forces, grave abuses against conflict-related detainees appear to be the main focus.

16. Can the ICC investigate crimes committed by US forces if the US is not a party to the Rome Statute?

Although the United States is not itself a member of the ICC, because alleged crimes took place by US nationals on the territory of Afghanistan, the Court is legally able to assert jurisdiction over them from May 1, 2003 onwards. Furthermore, the Court has jurisdiction over all international crimes in other countries that are members of the Court where so-called US “black sites” operated, regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators (this includes Afghanistan, but also countries like Poland, Romania, Lithuania where detainees were taken for interrogation). 

17. What role can victims play in the Court’s work?

There are three main areas of involvement:

(1) Victim Representations: when the judges/chambers are deciding whether to accept the Prosecutors’ request to investigate (see 14), they may ask for the opinions of victims.

(2) Victim Participation: Once charges are filed against specific individuals (see 15), victims can apply to be recognised by the Court and will then be represented by a lawyer who can participate on their behalf at relevant stages of the proceedings. The Court will also try to keep victims informed about the status of proceedings.

(3) Reparations: If an accused is convicted, victims can receive reparations. It has already ordered reparations for victims in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali, but this requires that an individual first be convicted for his or her crimes. The ICC’s Trust Fund for Victims (TFV) implements Court-ordered reparations; it also has the authority to provide physical, psychological, and material support to victims and their families in situations where the Court is investigating.

18. What role can civil society play in the Court’s work?

During investigations, the Prosecutor sometimes asks local civil society organisations that have information about the alleged crimes to help lead them to sources of evidence such as witnesses. Sometimes they seek to make formal arrangements with people they call ‘intermediaries’.  Civil society should talk to lawyers or groups who work on these kinds of investigations to fully understand the consequences of giving such information later on if it is used in a trial. For example, any information given to the Prosecutor might have to be revealed to the defence in the case.

19. Is information provided by victims to the ICC confidential?

Information provided to judges by victims about whether they want an investigation to open is not made public. Information provided to the Prosecutor when the investigation starts is not made public, although defence lawyers can ask for such information. The Court has significant discretion regarding how much information it needs to share with anyone at this stage. Victims should talk to lawyers or groups who work on these kinds of investigations to fully understand their rights and potential risks before talking to the Court.

20. Can other countries stop the Court if they don’t want this investigation?

The only way that countries can legally stop an investigation is to ask the UN Security Council to defer an investigation, for a renewable period of 12 months. This is not easy: it requires a majority of the Security Council’s vote (9+ out of 15), and no vetoes from any of the permanent member states (US, UK, Russia, China, France). It is noteworthy that the US has not joined the Court but if warrants are issued for American citizens, then they can be arrested if they travel to countries that are ICC members.

Because of the principle of complementarity (see The ICC in General, 9, above), states that are themselves in a position to prosecute these crimes will have the opportunity at different stages to argue that the ICC should stop its actions because they are already investigating the same crimes themselves.

21. What has been the effect of ICC investigations in other countries?

It’s important to see the ICC as having two roles: one being the investigations and trials themselves, the other being the impact the Court can have on domestic prosecutions. A good outcome is accelerating and expanding domestic accountability by, for instance, passing domestic legislation that criminalises international crimes, prosecuting accused individuals before national courts, upgrading domestic court systems to vigorously prosecute such crimes, and passing domestic legislation that improves the means by which to do so (such as improving witness protection programs). So far, ICC examinations and investigations in other countries have led to some prosecutions by local or national courts, as in Uganda, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Moreover, although some commentators express concern that the ICC’s involvement can complicate conflict situations, others have argued that the Court has actually helped support peace negotiations in countries emerging from conflict, like Uganda and Colombia, by ensuring that accountability is part of the countries’ post-conflict agreement.

 

 

(1) The first version of this Questions and Answers document was prepared by the Open Society Justice Initiative for a seminar series. OSJI kindly offered the document to AAN for publication and AAN’s Ehsan Qaane has completed it with information about the Prosecutor’s request. For in-depth information about the ICC in Afghanistan, see AAN’s previous publications here, here and here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many Afghan migrants have been opting to travel through Bulgaria, a country bordering Turkey, on their journey to western and northern Europe. This route, while safer than a sea crossing, comes with its own terrifying experiences, as first-hand testimonies of migrants collected by different human rights organisations have shown. In Bulgaria, Afghan migrants are not only in danger of being attacked by vigilante groups or push back to Turkey, as the reports have shown, but they are also more likely to receive unfair treatment at the hands of the national migration authorities, AAN’s Jelena Bjelica discovered on a recent visit to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. She also found that many of them eventually end up being returned to Afghanistan by force or under pressure.

Afghans in Bulgaria

Bulgaria, an EU member-country at the southern border of the Union, has seen an unprecedented movement of migrants between its own south-eastern border with Turkey and its western border with Serbia, since 2015. According to a joint annual border monitoring report by the UNHCR, Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the Bulgarian General Border Police Directorate with the Ministry of Interior, the police detained a total of 34,056 irregular migrants (the majority of whom were Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis) who were attempting to cross the Bulgarian border illegally in 2015. Of these, 26,939 had submitted applications for international protection to the border or immigration police (see here). The country remained the preferred land route for refugees after the closure of what was dubbed the Balkan humanitarian corridor in early 2016, which stretched between Greece, Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary and later extended to Croatia (see this AAN analysis).

Afghans in particular favour the route through Bulgaria. In 2016 they made up over half of the 18,884 migrants apprehended there. These numbers were in fact lower in 2016 than in 2015 as the number of refugees arriving in Europe had decreased that year (see this AAN analysis).

Testimonies from Afghans collected by numerous media (see here, here and here) and the human rights organisations (see the Human Rights Watch report here and the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights report here, as well as the Are You Syrious report here) reveal that most of them experienced humiliation, maltreatment and abuse by the Bulgarian authorities. This includes police extortion and robbery; ‘push-backs’ to Turkey (the most frequent expulsion method allegedly applied by the Bulgarian police authorities was forcibly returning migrants picked up near the Turkish border, while ensuring that a Turkish border patrol would take them further into Turkish territory; see here), indefinite detention in spite of official requests for asylum, a lack of access to legal aid and a low rate of accepted asylum applications. Afghans and others also experienced attacks by private, government-tolerated vigilante groups (see also this AAN analysis).

Asylum claims and ‘punitive detentions’

Afghan claims for asylum in Bulgaria have often been rejected without fair consideration and applicants have often been persuaded to give up their claims and return to Afghanistan, lawyers from three different legal aid organisations in Bulgaria pointed out to AAN. This has resulted in a situation whereby Afghans make up the biggest number of asylum seekers in Bulgaria, while their recognition rate is negligible. (1) The rate is also one of the lowest in the EU (only 2,5 per cent in 2016, compared to an EU average of 56 per cent).

Afghans, instead, are put into detention centres (2) and often pressurised into returning home. This practice of ‘punitive detention’ dates back to the riots in the Harmanli camp near the Bulgarian-Turkish border in late 2016. Harmanli made Bulgarian and international headlines in November 2017, when Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov said they had arrested some 300 Afghan migrants after they had protested against poor living conditions in the camp and clashed with the police. Iliana Savova from the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee told AAN that the riots had been a turning point in Bulgaria’s public opinion and consequently its treatment of Afghans. Since then, she said, Afghans have been detained more frequently than other nationalities and kept in detention for longer periods of time. “There is a general assumption in Bulgaria that Afghans are not eligible for asylum status,” she concluded.

This unfavourable treatment is even evident in the latest statistics released by the Bulgarian Ministry of Interior. By 31 October 2017, the ministry reported a total of 2,678 third-country nationals detained so far this year. Of this number, 39,3 per cent were Afghans, making them the top nationality among all foreign nationals detained. (Many of the Afghans detained have been returned by force or voluntarily to Afghanistan; more on this below.)

Diana Daskalova, a lawyer from the Centre for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria, one of the two small organisations that work inside the detention centres (the second one is the Foundation for Access to Rights), pointed out to AAN that many violations take place in those facilities. She said that migrants often do not receive sufficient information about their rights in the asylum process (which partly has to do with the fact that the non-governmental organisations are too small to cover all the applicants) and that migrants are often subjected to “systematic psychological pressure,” which eventually makes them consent to returning to their home country. Even after they register an asylum claim, Daskalova says, Afghans are not usually moved to open centres as they are in many other European countries, but instead are kept in detention.

Bulgaria amended its national asylum law to introduce the detention of asylum seekers on 1 January 2016. Until then, Bulgarian legislation had not formally envisaged the detention of asylum seekers. In practice, however, they had been frequently detained as irregular immigrants (see this EU migration law blog by Valeria Ilareva, the head of the Foundation for Access to Rights). Ilareva pointed out that with regard to asylum seekers, however, neither the EU legal framework, nor Bulgarian national law, “provide for an exact time limit of the length of detention,” but that under the EU Return Directive 2008/115/EC, “a maximum time limit of detention of 18 months, which has also been adopted in Bulgarian law” is stipulated. She further explained how the system in Bulgaria works:

[…] Under the amendments in the asylum legislation, the competent authority for issuing detention orders for asylum seekers is the head of the State Agency for Refugees (or an official authorized by him), who is also the decision-making body on the applications for international protection in the country. […]

Usually, asylum seekers who have entered the country irregularly are immediately issued a removal order and detained for the purpose of its execution. It is against this background that asylum seekers make their applications for international protection, often from within the detention centre for irregular immigrants. Their asylum application is forwarded to the State Agency for Refugees, which is the competent institution to register the third country nationals as asylum seekers and accommodate them in the reception centres for asylum seekers. For the latter there is no time limit in national law, which makes access to the asylum procedure arbitrary: registration as asylum seeker might take from several days to several months (if the asylum seekers’ removal order has not been carried out in the meantime). By national law, upon registration as asylum seeker, the implementation of one’s removal order is suspended until a final negative decision on the asylum application enters into force. (3)

The State Refugee Agency’s (SAR) asylum decisions can be appealed in court, lawyers in Bulgaria say. The SAR decisions are based on their own country of origin’s situation reports, which are not public documents. (4)

The unfair treatment of Afghan nationals by the Bulgarian authorities was also highlighted in a recently leaked letter sent by the European Commission to the Bulgarian State Agency for Refugees and the Ministry of Interior in July 2017, as the online publication Balkan Insight reported. The letter sent by the director of the Commission’s Migration and Protection Directorate, Laurent Muschel, on 6 July 2017, noted that Bulgaria’s recognition rate of Afghan nationals is “strikingly low compared to the rate of recognition (granting of international protection status) for the same nationality in other EU countries.”

The letter also confirms:

Particular concerns have also been expressed by stakeholders about the fact that Afghan nationals are apparently often detained for lengthy periods and to a considerably greater extent than occurs for other nationalities.

Even though Bulgaria is under increased political pressure from its European counterparts to improve its treatment of migrants, and in particular Afghans, only 356 Afghans are currently housed in reception centres in the country (the figures, as of 19 October 2017, provided by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee).

Police extortion and push-backs

The European border agency, Frontex, reinforced its presence in Bulgaria in August 2016, but push-backs – prohibited by international refugee and human rights law, ie the non-refoulement principle ­(5) – are still happening to Turkey, a worker with an international organisation in Bulgaria told AAN. The level of the police violence in 2017, which has been well documented in the past, however, has seen a decrease. (6)

Bulgaria’s track record of police abuse since 2015 has been well documented. Reports by Human Rights Watch and the Belgrade Centre for Human Rights put forward detailed accounts supported by first-hand testimonies. (7)

During its research trip to Belgrade in June 2016, AAN also documented the stories of Afghans who came through Bulgaria and experienced police brutality. A young Afghan who had travelled from Teheran told AAN:

When we got into Bulgaria we had to walk for three nights and four days. We were with 30 Afghans. There were families and also an old man and an old woman. Some boys had to carry the old woman. In Bulgaria the police got us. A car was supposed to pick us up and bring us to Sofia. [The smugglers] said it would take one hour, but in the end we had to sleep in the forest. There the Bulgarian police found us. They brought us back to the Turkish border at around midnight. We tried to make a fire, but it was raining. The police had taken all our food and money, and they beat us before they released us. It rained till morning.

Bulgarian police brutality has even been documented in an art project, run by the prestigious Belgrade-based Centre for Cultural Decontamination. Ahmad Favad, from Afghanistan and currently in Belgrade, related his story:

The mobile phone that I took on my journey to Europe was a memento from my brother. When I left for Iran I took some clothes and his iPhone. He once told me that he would let me keep it when he leaves for Sweden. He didn’t succeed, death stopped him. […] I passed Iran and Turkey and managed to keep my phone. However, in Bulgaria at the border with Turkey we got caught by police. They took all our money and everything they could find. I told the police officer, I explained to him that I would give him the money and anything he wanted, I begged him to return my phone… They didn’t want to. They didn’t give me back my brother’s phone. […] Whenever I remember that I didn’t succeed to keep it safe, I feel guilty.

Threats from the vigilante groups and skinheads

Apart from government authorities, refugees coming to Bulgaria – including Afghans – face violence from private vigilante groups. A video posted online by one of these groups, the Organisation for the Protection of Bulgarian Citizens (OPBC) show a man who ties the hands of three Afghan men behind their backs and forces them to lie on the ground, while he shouts “No Bulgaria. Go back to Turkey”. The video made headlines in early 2016 and sparked a debate in Bulgaria and beyond about the existence of such groups (see here, here and here).

In Bulgaria, however, the tone of the debate was far less critical than in the other parts of the world. German public external broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW) reported in April 2016 that the country’s prime minister, Boiko Borisov, publicly praised the vigilantes and suggested that the protection of the country’s southern border should be a group effort. DW also quoted a public opinion poll from 2016, which found that eighty-four per cent of Bulgarians supported the vigilantes’ actions, with just 16 per cent opposed to them. Borisov, the Economist later reported, after the release of the OPBC video, condemned the practice of ‘citizen arrests’ and warned that anyone who carried them out would be prosecuted.

Following Borisov’s statement, Petar Nizamov, the man who posted the videos on behalf of OPCB, was detained by the police and placed under house arrest. But he resurfaced again in early 2017 when he announced, according to some media accounts, that he had bought an old Russian helicopter to continue his hunt. Nizamov was officially acquitted by the court of charges in connection with the alleged illegal detention of three Afghan migrants close to the Turkish border in August 2017. Nizamov’s group is not the only one operating along the border area.

While these groups continue to pose a serious threat to migrants trying to cross the Turkish–Bulgarian border, in the capital Sofia skinhead groups intimidate them. An Afghan from Kabul currently residing in the Voina Rampa reception centre in Sofia (there are three open centres in the capital and Afghans are mainly housed in the Voina Rampa), told AAN that one of his friends was recently beaten by the skinheads near a bus station, some 100 meters from the centre. He explained that his friend reported the incident, but “the police did nothing,” he said.

Returns to Afghanistan

The Bulgarian authorities’ approach, as explained above, results in a high rate of returns to Afghanistan. Biljana Stankovic, general coordinator for Médecins Du Monde (MdM) in Bulgaria explained to AAN how migrants, and in particular Afghans, are manipulated into returning home. She said that besides this, they do not have access to correct information, there are often no translators available, and refugees are kept under constant pressure of expulsion even after they have submitted an asylum claim. “For example, the way they are treating unaccompanied minors is telling of practices in Bulgaria,” she said, adding that minors are often forced to sign documents they cannot read or understand. “Whether there are any voluntary returns, is questionable,” she alleged.

According to the Bulgarian MoI’s official figures, over 690 Afghans – or 39,1 per cent of a total of 1,771 third-country nationals had been returned to their country by the end of October 2017 since the beginning of the year. This number includes those that were forced back (441 foreigners); (8) those with imposed coercive administrative measures who voluntarily left the country with their own funds (343 foreigners); those who returned with the assistance of the Migration Directorate in the implementation of programmes for assisted voluntary returns (800 foreigners); those without forced coercive administrative measures who left the country voluntarily (46 foreigners); and those have been surrendered to other EU Member States when performing readmission procedures under Regulation 604/2013 EC, ie the Dublin Regulation (141 third-country nationals). (The Bulgarian MoI does not offer the breakdown by nationality for each of category, so there are no figures for Afghans in each category).

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) dataset, 404 Afghans returned to Afghanistan from Bulgaria between 1 January and mid-August 2017 through the organisation’s Assisted Voluntary Return programme. But, as AAN previously reported, there is little they can hope for in Afghanistan. Services available to those returning are patchy.

Daskalova, from the Centre for Legal Aid, and MDM’s Stankovic said to AAN that the number of returns has increased over the past couple of years. This is confirmed by the IOM’s data on voluntary returns from Bulgaria. While in 2015 only 16 Afghans returned voluntarily from this country, their number increased to 276 in 2016, and to over 400 in 2017.

Bulgaria: A grim outlook for Afghans

While the evidence suggests that Afghans would be better off avoiding Bulgaria, the lack of other travel options dictates the reality of their journey. The fact is that the number of land routes to western and northern Europe has been reduced to the one that goes through Bulgaria following the closure of the Balkan humanitarian corridor in March 2016. Many Afghans who are stuck in Turkey or Greece and still harbour plans of making it through are instinctively discouraged by the dangers that comes with a sea journey from Greece to Italy so they do not even consider this a viable option (see also AAN’s analysis). They have no other way open to them, other than transiting through Bulgaria in the hope of reaching Serbia. Yet while the treatment of migrants in the reception centres is somewhat better there, their prospects of getting international protection status are almost non-existent (see these previous AAN analyses here and here).

It can only be hoped that increased political pressure from the European Union, as the European Commission letter quoted above, will make the situation for Afghans in Bulgaria more bearable.

Edited by Thomas Ruttig and Sari Kouvo

 

(1) Statistics from the website of the State Agency for Refugees show that Afghans lead the number of submitted asylum claims. Afghans made 1,002 claims since the beginning of the year until end of September 2017 and were granted asylum in the same period (breakdown by month): January 2017 – 0; February 2017 – 0; March 2017 – 5 refugee statuses; April 2017 – ­5 refugee statuses; May 2017 – 6 refugee statuses; June 2017 – 7 refugee statuses; July 2017 – 7 refugee statuses; 1 humanitarian status; August 2017 – 13 refugee statuses; 2 humanitarian statuses; September 2017 – 14 refugee statuses; 2 humanitarian statuses.

In fact, the SAR’s statistics show that Afghans submitted by far the highest number of asylum applications between January 1993 — when the agency started collecting statistical track records — and 31 October 2017. Afghans made some 25,166 asylum claims during this period, followed by Syrians (21,041 claims); Iraqis (19,365 claims) and Pakistanis (3,023 claims).

(2) There are three centres in Bulgaria: Bousmantsi in Sofia, Lyubimets and Elhovo.  The Foundation for Access to Rights’ studies about the Bulgarian detention system available here; here and here.

(3) Daskalova, from the Centre for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria, in an email exchange with the author [dated 22 November 2017] explained that according to recent changes in the Bulgarian Law on Refugees the SAR has a three days deadline for the registration of submitted asylum claims, and six days if the claim has been submitted through a different authority such as a detentions centre. “Another question is whether these provisions are implemented by the authorities,” she added.

(4) All three Bulgarian lawyers told AAN that even after the deadly Kabul bomb attack on 31 May 2017, which left over 90 dead and over 500 injured and caused major infrastructure damage, including to the Bulgarian Embassy in Kabul, (see AAN analyses here and here) nothing has changed in the treatment towards Afghans and pressure has continued as have returns, both forced and ‘voluntary’, to Afghanistan.

(5) The non-refoulement principle laid down in Art. 33, para 1 of the Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 stipulates that no Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his/her life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.

(6) A researcher with an international organisation, however, hinted that there is a “strange overlap between police and criminal groups.” This was also confirmed by Iliana Savova, the director of the legal protection of refugees and migrants programme of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, who told AAN that the police in Bulgaria is, in fact, facilitating the smuggling of migrants. Yet the high number of pushbacks could also indicate that there is a financial link between the police and the smuggling groups, as migrants are forced to pay more money each time they try to cross the border.

(7) The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee also reported in 2015 that “various groups of asylum-seekers reported throughout the year that the Bulgarian border police including the mixed patrols deployed for state border protection pushed them back into the Turkish territory not only from the border line but also from inland borderareas (a border zone is considered to be the zone 30 km from the border line).”

(8) The Bulgarian MoI monthly report does not specify what exactly is meant by ‘forced back’. Daskalova, from the Centre for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria, in an email exchange with the author explained that “forced [back] returns are deportations on budget from the Ministry of Interior.” “The rest [other categories listed by the MoI] are at the expense of IOM or [the migrants’] own expense,” she wrote, adding that those “without deportation orders are people in situations when still no administrative measures have been imposed and they have taken action to return, notifying the migration [authority].”

In should be also noted that the Afghan embassy in Bulgaria does not issue travel documents to persons who refuse to return voluntarily. (For more details see this study).

 

While struggling to prepare for the parliamentary (and supposedly also district council) elections scheduled for the 7 July 2018, the Independent Election Commission (IEC) and Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) are finding themselves under increasing fire from a growing number of political groups and election observer bodies. There have been allegations of financial corruption, government interference and divisions within the two commissions. Playing upon these issues, political groups are demanding that all the electoral commissioners be sacked and replaced with new ones. In a move possibly intended to alleviate the pressure, President Ghani has now sacked the chair of the IEC. AAN’s Ali Yawar Adili considers these demands and what they might mean for the credibility of the elections and the likelihood of them happening on time.

This is part one of a series of dispatches about where the preparations for the next elections stand. The following parts will address technical issues and district elections.  

This research was supported by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.

The first casualty of the criticism mounting against IEC and ECC has come: on 15 November 2017, President Ashraf Ghani sacked IEC chairman Najibullah Ahmadzai, three days after five of Ahmadzai’s fellow commissioners had written to the president asking for his dismissal. The Palace issued a statement, but it was vague, just saying the government had responded to IEC members and asking “relevant institutions” to introduce fresh candidates. Ahmadzai, in turn, said the government had acted against him because he had been standing against illegal demands by the presidential palace which he said included the demand to manipulate the elections. He provided no evidence.

External pressure had been mounting on the commissions, particularly since early October when a broad coordination group of political organisations and protest movements came out with fierce criticism against the two bodies. Called the Shura-ye Tafahum-e Jeryanha-ye Siyasi Afghanistan (the Understanding Council of Political Currents of Afghanistan), it demanded the complete replacement of the members of both commissions.

The election commissioners are appointed by the president from a shortlist prepared by a selection committee (more on which below). The IEC has seven members, four appointed for five years and the other three for three years. The ECC has five members, three of whom are appointed for five years and the other two for three years. The current teams are completely new. The old teams were all dismissed, despite not having run to the end of their terms because they were tainted by their role in the disputed 2014 presidential elections: Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah’s camp had accused the two bodies of overseeing widespread fraud in favour of President Ghani. Operating under the assumption that the current IEC and ECC members will serve full terms, they are due to administer both upcoming elections. Parliamentary and district elections are due in 2018 – in this dispatch, we mainly refer to parliamentary elections only, as district elections have never been held before and fundamental preparations for them, including drawing up constituency boundaries, are not yet evident; we hope to look at them in more detail in a future piece. Presidential elections are due in 2019.

The current IEC and ECC members were appointed and sworn in in November 2016, two months after the government finally, after a lengthy deadlock on electoral reform, managed to pass a new electoral law. Although there was some controversy at the time, both over the choice and the process of selection, (see this AAN dispatch which includes short biographies here), it had seemed that the inauguration of the new IEC and ECC had broken the protracted stalemate in the attempt to agree on electoral reforms and that these new faces could now start planning the next (already overdue) parliamentary elections. However, almost one year on after the formation of the IEC and ECC, political groups have focused their attention on the members of these electoral bodies, seizing upon allegations of financial corruption, undue presidential influence on the IEC and internal divisions in both commissions as evidence of their inability to oversee elections.

It is worth noting that all the various political forces, whether in government or out of it, consider it crucial who controls the two commissions, as they will play a crucial role in determining who will become Afghanistan’s next MPs and next president. They will play that role whether or not the elections are fair or rigged. This obsession with the commissions was manifested very vividly in the post-2014 electoral reform process, which, as AAN previously wrote, largely boiled down not to reform as such, but to “a tug of war over who controls the electoral bodies – and through them the election’s outcome.”

Accusations and accusers

The Understanding Council of Political Currents of Afghanistan, which has hoovered up most of the opposition groupings and protest movements (full list of members below), has said in its 7 October statement entitled “The Joint Position of the Understanding Council of Political Currents of Afghanistan in Connection with the Transparency of Elections,” that the IEC “with its current composition” did not have the “ability to hold transparent and fraud-free elections and is not trusted by the people or the political currents.” It claimed that the IEC lacked “independence in decision-making,” a “spirit of impartiality,” and “sufficient and necessary managerial capacity” and was marred by “financial corruption and lack of transparency in purchases and internal disputes among the members.” The Council, without giving more detail about its allegations, demanded that:

In order to hold transparent, free and fair elections and prevent the elections from going into crisis… [t]he commissioners and heads of the electoral commissions [should] be dismissed as soon as possible and the National Unity Government [NUG] in agreement with political parties, civil organisations and prominent political personalities, [should] introduce and appoint other eligible members instead of them.

The Council also reopened a much chewed-over, legal debate, contending that the legislative decree issued by the president to pass the electoral law had not been not valid (more on this below).

Individually, members of the Understanding Council, some of whom are members or appointees of the government, had since taken up the call for the dismissal of some or all IEC members. Balkh Governor and Jamiat Chief Executive Atta Muhammad Nur, for instance, on 31 October 2017, called on the NUG to dissolve the current IEC and appoint new and “impartial commissioners.” On 16 October 2017, Foreign Minister Salahuddin Rabbani said the current IEC did not have the ability to hold elections “at the specified time in a transparent and acceptable fashion,” citing lack of clarity on “electoral constituencies, the budget of the electoral commissions and voter registration.” Understanding Council members have also accused the NUG of lacking the political will to hold elections. Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, a former finance minister and now head of the opposition New National Front of Afghanistan (NNFA), said on 22 October 2017 that the NUG had no intention of holding elections next year and that it was failing to recognise “the importance of time.” Ahadi’s criticism came one day after Afghan media reported that the president had sacked the head of the IEC secretariat (also known as the chief electoral officer) Imam Muhammad Warimach. Ahadi welcomed the dismissal and said he hoped for more changes to the IEC). Some media reports suggested that Warimach’s dismissal was connected with him speaking in public about the political pressure he said the IEC was under – he referred to “threats to the IEC, personal insults, a propaganda campaign and fraud by some circles.” Other Afghan media, however, reported that Warimach was fired by the president over corruption and poor performance (read here and here). (For more detail on the sacking, see footnote [1].)

The Understanding Council’s demand for new commissioners also came in the wake of an internal dispute within the IEC and ECC (more on this below) and at a time when the IEC is struggling to prepare for the next parliamentary (and district) elections scheduled for 7 July 2018. The parliamentary election is itself more than two years overdue and this has provided the opportunity for various political groups to doubt the NUG’s political will to hold them. So far, since 2001, no elections have been held on time – but none of them with such a long delay. Even so, as the clock ticks on this particular electoral process, both the electoral bodies and the electoral timeline are being scrutinised with increasing scepticism by both national and international observers.

In Afghanistan, the findings of a recent survey conducted by the Transparent Election Foundation of Afghanistan (TEFA) and released on 9 October 2017 showed that a high percentage of people were not upbeat about the IEC’s ability to administer elections effectively. According to this survey, 41 per cent of respondents do not believe that the IEC has the capacity to hold a transparent elections, while 29 per cent believe it does and 30 per cent are uncertain. TEFA did not ask whether people thought any body could oversee elections effectively, so it is not clear if the doubts are about the IEC per se or Afghan elections in general. [2] Another assessment by the Elections and Transparency Watch Organisation of Afghanistan (ETWA), released on 5 October 2017, stated that it considered the IEC to be incapable of holding parliamentary elections next year and that the necessary reforms had not been implemented.

Special Representative of the UN Secretary General to Afghanistan Tadamichi Yamamoto, in his briefing to the United Nations Security Council on 25 September 2017, also said that many stakeholders remained “sceptical that credible elections will be held on time.” This doubt has opened – so far not publically – discussions about alternative scenarios: to move the election date to October or November 2018 or even to hold the parliamentary poll together with the presidential election in 2019.

Who is in the Understanding Council and how much clout do they have?

The Understanding Council, which presented itself for the first time at a press conference on 7 November 2017 as a “coordination group” (no other details given), includes the following parties and organisations:

• Mehwar-e Mardom-e Afghanistan, a political group formed in July 2017 by former allies and aides of former president Hamed Karzai, including the former director of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Rahmatullah Nabil, former National Security Adviser, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, and former Minister Of Transport And Civil Aviation (and former chief electoral officer) Daud Ali Najafi. The group says it aspires to take an independent political course from Karzai and presents itself as an opposition to the NUG (read AAN’s previous analysis about Mehwar here;
• The Coalition for the Salvation of Afghanistan, a semi-opposition group, also known as the Ankara Coalition, formed at the end of June 2017 by first vice-president and leader of Jombesh-e Melli-ye Islami Abdul Rashid Dostum, second deputy chief executive and leader of Hezb-e Wahdat-e Mardom Muhammad Mohaqeq, (acting) foreign minister and acting head of Jamiat-e Islami Salahuddin Rabbani and Balkh governor and chief executive of Jamiat Atta Muhammad Nur. They represent three major political parties which have shown strong ethnic support in the polls (Uzbek, Hazara and Tajik, respectively) and have remained internal dissenters and objectors within the NUG (read AAN’s previous analysis on the Ankara coalition here);
• The Council for the Protection and Stability of Afghanistan (CPSA), a political group formed on 18 December 2015 by influential jihadi leader, 2014 presidential candidate and leader of Dawat-e Islami Party (formerly the Ittihad-e Islami faction) Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, former vice-president and Jamiat stalwart Yunos Qanuni and other prominent former members of Karzai cabinets including Muhammad Omar Daudzai and Bismillah Khan Muhammadi (both former interior ministers), Wahid Shahrani (former minister of mines), Ismail Khan (Herat strongman and former minister of energy and water), Sadiq Mudaber (former director of Karzai’s office of administrative affairs) and Abdul Rauf Ibrahimi and Fazl Hadi Muslimyar, speakers of the lower and upper houses of the parliament (read AAN’s analysis about the council and front here);
• The New National Front of Afghanistan, formed by former finance minister and former leader of the Afghan Mellat Party, Anwar ul-Haq Ahadi, on 14 January 2016. It has presented itself as an opposition force and is a coalition of (parts of) various small political parties, including Afghan Mellat, Hezb-e Adalat wa Tawseha (Justice and Development Party), the former mujahedin faction Harakat-e Inqilab-e Islami (Islamic Revolution Movement of Afghanistan) (read AAN’s analysis about the council and front here);
• Hezb-e Mutahed-e Melli (National United Party) led by Nur ul-Haq Ulumi, a former People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) military general and governor of Kandahar. Ulumi allied himself with Jamiat-e Islami in the coalition that supported Dr Abdullah in the 2009 and 2014 presidential elections; he served as interior minister in the NUG (January 2015 to February 2016) (see AAN’s previous analysis here and here);
• De Loya Kandahar de Yawwali au Hamghagi Bahir (the Greater Kandahar Unity and Coordination Movement), a regional grouping which includes locally influential figures from the southern provinces. According to Kandahar-based journalist Mamun Durrani, the movement is run by Kandahar police chief General Abdul Razeq, MP Lalai Hamedzai (from Kandahar) and Sher Muhammad Akhundzada (former Helmand governor who is also and close ally of former president Karzai) and the head of Zabul provincial council, Atta Jan Haq Bayan; all are reportedly unhappy with President Ghani;
• De Mashreqi Welayatuno de Hamghagi Shura (the Eastern Provinces Coordination Council) was launched on 1 August 2017 with scathing criticisms of Ghani and Abdullah for what it said was a failure to deliver on (unspecified) promises. Abdul Malek Sulaimanzai, one of the Council’s leaders, told AAN on 2 November 2017 that it included “all the [political] elites of eastern provinces,” such as influential MPs and former mujahedin commanders and figures from Nangarhar, Hazrat Ali, Mirwais Yasini, Haji Zaher Qader as well as Sakhi Meshwanai, an MP from Kunar, and Muhammad Hassan Mamozai, an MP from Laghman;
• Jombesh-e Guzar (the Transition Movement), a Tajik nationalist grouping which announced its existence on 11 May 2017;
• Rastakhez-e Taghir or Uprising for Change, a movement that emerged out of protests in the wake of 31 May 2017 truck bombing near Zanbaq square (see AAN’s analysis on Uprising for Change here); and
• The Commission for the Coordination of Political and Civil Organisations, a political grouping of 12 or so parties including Hezb-e Bidari-ye Mellat Afghanistan (Afghanistan Nation’s Awakening Party), the Republican Party of Afghanistan led by Adela Bahram and Qiyam-e Melli (National Uprising) Party led by Kandahari businessman Zmarialai Ahadi. According to Maqsud Hassanzada of the Nation Awakening Party, the group was established around two years ago by people who had supported President Ghani in the 2014 presidential election, but were disgruntled with him after “he closed the Palace’s gate to them.” Hassanzada said that some of the 12 parties, including his own, were no longer with the Commission for the Coordination of Political and Civil Organisations. However, he said that even those parties that had defected from the Commission might join the Understanding Council. He remained critical of the president, calling him “a liar and reneging on his promises.”

The list of the Understanding Council’s members shows that it is a very broad political umbrella group and includes many of the major fully or semi-opposition political groupings that have emerged during the NUG tenure. It includes both those inside and outside government. The council has enormous political weight, although also a strong tendency to fragment, given that only a common desire to change the IEC and ECC appears to bind it together. It does not even have a common platform of replacement commissioners to propose.

IEC secretary and spokesman Gula Jan Badi Sayyad has tried to play down the significance of the Council, claiming, for example, during a TV discussion on 11 October 2017, that those who demanded the dismissal of the IEC members were just “12 parties” and that “the big parties” were “happy with the commission’s performance to an extent.”

The trust deficit

As was mentioned, at the very outset, the way appointments to the IEC and ECC were made were criticised by both political opposition groups and election observer organisations. First, there were accusations that certain circles around the president had interfered in the formation of the Selection Committee, the body enshrined in the electoral law with the responsibility for vetting and shortlisting applicants for membership of the IEC and ECC. Election observer organisations like TEFA and ETWA complained that the Selection Committee had been formed while most civil society activists were out of the country for the 2016 Brussels conference. They also questioned its transparency and independence, citing the fact that its secretariat was run by the Administrative Office of the President where the committee was also located and also alleging that the committee took most of its decisions behind closed doors, far from observers’ eyes. Second, the appointees were also criticised for lack of necessary experience and expertise. The comparatively small NNFA called the appointments “non-transparent and interest-based,” and aired its doubts about the “transparency of next parliamentary and presidential election” (see AAN’s previous analysis here).

Allegations of government influence on the work of the electoral commissions also followed. On 24 April 2017, Humayun Humayun, first deputy speaker of the Wolesi Jirga, claimed that the president had taken unsigned resignation letters from seven IEC members before appointing them and warned that if they did not obey his demands in the next elections, he would approve their resignations. This claim was picked up by NNFA leader Ahadi who said that he had suspected it “all along” and was firmly of “the belief that this government is not going to hold honest election and we’ll have another disaster.” Humayun, on 25 September 2017, further alleged that a president’s uncle (name not given) was working to engineer elections on the president’s behalf, and that he was doing it by inviting some MPs to his office in Kart-e Parwan, asking them to support “Ghani’s government.” In return, their names would be on the list of the next MPs (see this ETWA’s parliamentary observation report here). [3]

In response to Humayun’s first accusation, the IEC and the ECC issued a joint statement on 25 July 2017 saying his was an effort to “confuse the public opinion” and “to reduce the credibility” of the electoral bodies. Imam Muhammad Warimach, then head of the IEC secretariat and speaking to the upper house on 26 September 2017, accused the first deputy speaker of the Wolesi Jirga of placing “political pressure on the president.” (The senators had summoned all the IEC members, but only Warimach showed up).

In early September 2017, mistrust in the IEC began to be increasingly voiced and not only by opposition groups. Critics also included the High Council of Jihadi and National Parties (HCJNP), the first grouping to emerge after the last presidential elections, in August 2015. The HCJNP includes three large parties considered to be pro-Ghani – Nejat-e Melli party led by former president Sebghatullah Mujaddedi, Wahdat-e Islami party led by former vice-president and current head of High Peace Council Muhammad Karim Khalili, and Mahaz-e Melli party of Sayyed Hamed Gailani (see AAN’s previous analysis here). In early September this year, the HCJNP (together with NNFA and CSPA both members of the Understanding Council) came up with a joint proposal titled “Proposal of the Council for Stability and Protection, Council of Jihadi and National Parties, and New National Front about the Transparency of Elections” (AAN has seen a copy of it) in which they made clear they were not happy with the electoral commissioners and the way they had been chosen, saying they had been presented with a fait accompli. (4)

The proposal called for a new election watchdog, an election observation council comprised of representatives of political groupings and parties that would “oversee all the affairs of the election commission [IEC] closely,” including the observation of recruitment and training of the employees in the centre and provinces, the introduction of technology in the elections and logistics and other affairs of the IEC. (5)

The Understanding Council has taken this a step further and, as mentioned above, called for the dissolution of the electoral commissions. It has also threatened that its member-parties will boycott and even prevent the elections if their demands are not met. Harun Mutaref, the head of Jombesh-e Guzar, said, “We will not let it [the elections] to be held in conditions that [mean the government] has such deep influence on the election commissions.” Ajmal Balochzada, head of the secretariat of Mehwar-e Mardom, in conversation with AAN on 2 November 2017, said that their demand to the NUG was either to directly dismiss the IEC and ECC members or accept discussions on “fundamental reforms,” without explaining what these fundamental reforms would look like, except that they would also eventually lead to the replacement of the commissioners. He said that if their demand for new electoral commissioners was not met, they would present an alternative plan, which he threatened, could be an alternative to both the electoral commissions and the NUG. Again he gave no explanation of what this alternative was. Another member of the Understanding Council told AAN on 8 November 2017 that the alternative plan had not yet been decided and it would be based on consultation with people and international community.

The demand for either an additional observation mechanism or the dissolution of the IEC and ECC show that political groups feel they were not (sufficiently) consulted on appointments to the IEC (and the ECC) and that there is widespread mistrust, including even from pro-Ghani parties in the IEC and EEC. However, neither of these two demands offers a solution. An external observation council would also be open to interference and a change of faces on the commissions might also just be the focus of a new struggle for control.

Reactions from the government and IEC

There were three responses from the government and the IEC. First, in reaction to the Understanding Council’s demand for the dismissal of commissioners, the president’s acting spokesman Shah Hussain Murtazawi told Tolo on 7 October 2017 that the IEC and ECC members had been appointed “based on the law and in accordance with a specific mechanism and will continue to work.” However, the Understanding Council has since questioned this very law; on 13 November 2017, Shiwa-ye Sharq, the head of Mehwar-e Mardom’s media committee, told AAN that the legal basis for IEC and ECC appointments, a presidential legislative decree without parliament’s approval, is invalid and this is the reason why commissioners are not trusted by the political groups. Murtazavi called on the political groups “to share their corrective views with the commission.”

Since then, FEFA and TEFA as well as Hezb-e Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar have called on the IEC to share their proposals for the “better conduct of elections.” However, Mehwar-e Mardom’s Shiwa-ye Sharq criticised this call, saying it did not make sense; neither Mehwar nor the Understanding Council, he said, would ever submit their views to commissioners they do not trust. Instead, he again insisted on the dissolution of the IEC and ECC and called for an agreement for what he called an inclusive and consultative framework for the appointment of fresh members and the development of an inclusive mechanism for the observation of the whole electoral process.

Second, on 6 November 2017, Murtazawi changed his tone and, in a piece published in Hasht-e Sobh, accused “a number of political currents and some election observer organisations” of “seeking to sabotage this national process [election] with political remarks.”

Third, the IEC, for its part, on 7 October 2017, described the criticism by the Understanding Council as “premature and illegal,” pointing out practical steps for holding the elections had already been taken. On 11 October 2017, then IEC chairman Najibullah Ahmadzai in a press conference rejected the allegation that the government was interfering in the IEC’s work (a position he reversed after he was sacked). Ahmadzai suggested that this accusation by the political currents had arisen from the tensions between the opposition and the government. He asked them not to involve the IEC in those tensions.

Other responses

Some Afghan election observers, such as Yusuf Rashid, FEFA executive director, have described the demand for the dismissal of the members of the electoral bodies as impractical. He and others have argued that it would reopen a time-consuming appointment process which could further delay the parliamentary and even the presidential elections. This point seems to be operating under the assumption that parliamentary elections in July 2018 are still feasible. At the same time, Rashid also pointed to the “issue of distrust in the process.” Politicians who are outside the government and the incumbent parliament, he told Hasht-e Sobh on 9 October 2017, were concerned about the government’s interference and an engineering of elections “in such a way” as to allow the NUG leaders to “bring their favourite individuals into institutions such as the parliament, provincial council and district councils.” Rashid urged the UN to play a more prominent role, not only providing technical support, but also doing “confidence-building and develop capacity within the commission for continuity of a sustainable administration.”

Divisions in the IEC and ECC

The current conflict between the commissions and its critics has been compounded by internal divisions within the IEC, an issue that has been picked up by the political groups as an additional argument, as mentioned in the joint statement of the Understanding Council, that the IEC’s “capability to hold transparent and fraud-free elections” and its credibility to be “trusted by the people and political currents.” Leading Mehwar-e Mardom figure Ajmal Baluchzada told AAN on 2 November that they had to “tell the people that the commissioners have proved incompetent after everything such as corruption and division in the IEC became evident.” (Divisions have also been seen in the EEC, although they have been less serious – see footnote (6) for more detail.)

The divisions were revealed by IEC member Maleha Hassan on 14 August 2017 during an event held by FEFA. She alleged that some IEC members had been “marginalised,” decisions were taken “secretly” by a small circle of commissioners and information was intentionally not shared with certain IEC members. Another IEC member Mazallah Dawlati, on 22 September 2017, also alleged that Chair Najibullah Ahmadzai, Abdul Qader Quraishi (the deputy for finance and administrative affairs), Gula Jan Badi Sayyad and Rafiullah Bidar were part of a group of IEC members who made decisions “secretly.” (Those supposedly out of the inner circle are Hassan, Dawlati and deputy for operations, Wasima Badghisi.) As an example, Dawlati said the four members had introduced three candidates to the president for the post of head of the IEC secretariat or CEO, without any final agreement among all the IEC members. [7]

These disputes resulted in Afghan media reporting, on 7 November 2017, that IEC chairman Najibullah Ahmadzai had resigned from his position (see here). This, however, was rejected by IEC spokesman Sayyad a day later. On 10 October 2017, the IEC issued a statement calling the media reports “baseless claims” and insisting Ahmadzai had neither resigned nor he intended to resign in the future. Maleha Hassan, however, told AAN on 8 November 2017 that the chairman had indeed been called to the Palace where he had been told to step down, but had refused to do so. A member of the Understanding Council claimed, when talking to AAN on 8 November 2017, that Chief Executive Dr Abdullah had confirmed to him that both NUG leaders wanted the IEC chairman to step down, a position, the member said, was an outcome of the pressure by the Understanding Council.

However, Ahmadzai’s refused to go. That, apparently, led to five IEC members Wasima Badghisi, Abdul Qader Quraishi (deputy heads for operations, and administration and finance, respectively), secretary and spokesman Gula Jan Badi Sayyad, Maliha Hassan and Mazaullah Dawlati to sign a letter calling for the IEC chairman to be fired. They said they had reviewed Ahmadzai’s activities and concluded that: he had worked against national interests and electoral law, misused his authority, and been negligent in his duties. On 15 November 2017, the president’s office issued a statement instructing the “relevant institutions” to introduce fresh candidates to the president to appoint instead of Najibullah Ahmadzai, “based on the [IEC]’s 21 Aqrab (12 November) decision and demand” for his dismissal.

One day later, Ahmadzai in a press conference called his dismissal “illegal,” saying the IEC members had demanded his resignation under threat of their own dismissal. He also accused the government of trying to delay the elections and told the people not to expect elections from the current government. According to article 16 of the electoral law, in the event of dismissal or resignation and death of an IEC member, the president should appoint a new member from among the remaining candidates introduced by the Selection Committee. (8) The call by the president’s office on the relevant institutions to introduce new candidates is unclear and only shows the complexity of the new appointment in the current heightened environment of distrust. Mehwar-e Mardom’s Shiwa-ye Sharq, in conversation with AAN on 13 November, had already warned that “a unilateral appointment of a new IEC chairman will not be acceptable.” This is further compounded by the pending fate of the head of the IEC secretariat and unresolved demand for the replacement of other IEC as well as all ECC members.

Reopening a legal debate

In addition to calling for the dismissal of all of the IEC and ECC commissioners, the Understanding Council has also reopened a legal controversy about the president’s authority to pass the electoral law which enabled the government to appoint new commissioners. Referring to article 109 (9) of the constitution which says that the National Assembly cannot amend election law in the last year of its legislative term, the Understanding Council in its joint statement concluded that if the parliament, as “the primary authority for legislation” does not have such an authority, then, a fortiori, neither does the president. It ruled that the president had “violated the law by issuing the decree” and so the decree was not legitimate. The Council’s statement also said that, according to article 90 of the constitution, which concerns the authorities of the National Assembly, the parliament, not the president, has the authority to approve, amend and repeal laws and legislative decrees. [10]

In fact, the Understanding Council in its statement called into question various issues: the need for a new legislative decree to amend the electoral laws; the president’s authority to issue a legislative decree; and his not sending it to the parliament for approval. The Understanding Council also criticised the amendments in the electoral law. It highlighted two areas: one, it called for preventing interference by the National Security Council in electoral affairs as the joint position said,” According to the legislative decree, involving the NSC in electoral affairs is [a] deviation from the principle of transparency, violation and trampling of the democratic process.”

This referred (as Mehwar-e Mardom’a Ajmal Baluchzada also confirmed it to AAN on 2 November 2017) to article 104 (11) of the electoral law which is about a possible postponement and suspension of elections. According to this article, upon proposal of the IEC and approval of a committee “comprised of the Head and members of the National Security Council, Chairmen of the two houses of the Parliament, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Chairman of the Independent Commission of Oversight of Implementation of the Constitution of Afghanistan,” elections can “be postponed for a period of up to four months,” in case “security situations, natural disasters and other similar conditions make impossible the principle of general and fair representation in holding elections and or undermine the credibility of the electoral process.” Second, it said that “articles of the legislative decree were about appointment, separation and dismissal of the permanent and temporary employees of the electoral bodies were “in contradiction with the civil service law and labour law and this threatens the job security of the employees with the government’s interference.” However, these criticisms have come very late and might have been raised only to try to increase the pressure on the government to replace IEC and ECC members.

A vote in 2018?

The IEC and ECC members, appointed in November 2016 as part of the electoral reform that the NUG leaders had promised, are now suffering both internal division and political pressure from opposition currents. Moreover, a number of election watchdogs have also rated them as incapable of holding parliamentary and district council elections, which the IEC has scheduled for 7 July 2018. The president and chief executive cannot fully ignore the demands of the Understanding Council, with its significant number of heavyweight politicians and groupings. The president may have sacked the IEC chairman on the demand of other IEC commissioners as an easy sacrifice, made in order to try to alleviate the pressure. However, the lack of constructive dialogue and consensus between the government, political groups and the IEC from the beginning of the electoral process will make finding agreement on what to do next difficult.

Electoral preparations have been turned into a battlefield between the government and its critics. This, in addition to the lack of reform and tardy preparations (which will be looked at in more detail in this series of dispatches) call seriously into question whether a credible election can be held, not only on schedule in July 2018 but even at a later date in the year. The Afghan government and its international backers may already be considering a Plan B. However, if they are, that may only enrage the government’s critics even further.

 

(1) On October 2017, Sayyad, the spokesman for the IEC, told AAN that the IEC had not received any formal notification from the presidential palace nor had it been informed of the reasons for the dismissal. He said, “If the decision to dismiss him is based on any plausible reasons, the IEC will accept it.” On 21 October 2017, Shah Hussain Murtazavi, the acting spokesman for the president, in conversation with AAN, neither rejected nor confirmed the reports, but nor did he say he was unaware of them. On 22 October 2017, Abdullah Nuri, assistant to Warimach, told AAN that the news was “totally wrong” and the source of the media reports “is unclear and Warimach continue to report to the duty.” He also dismissed the report that Warimach had been fired due to corruption saying that “there has been no budget allocated for the election yet and where can be the corruption from.” On 8 November 2017, IEC member Maleha Hassan told AAN that the president in a meeting in the presence of the IEC members and representatives of the International Community told Warimach verbally: “You are a sharif (respected) person, but you cannot work for the IEC. The procurement is in crisis and appointments are problematic. The government is big and there will be a place for you.” She further said that the IEC had not received any official dismissal letter yet, though.

(2) TEFA’s survey asked the following questions:

1. In your opinion, will parliamentary and district councils elections be held next year at the announced date? (45% of the participants were optimistic, 32% uncertain and 23% believed the elections would not be held on time.)
2. Do you think the Afghan government is impartial in relation to next year’s elections? (29% said yes, 33% were uncertain, and 38% said no.)
3. In your opinion, does the IEC have the capacity to hold a transparent elections? (29% believed the IEC had the capacity to hold a transparent election, 30% were uncertain and 41% did not
4. Will you participate in parliamentary and district councils next year? (14% said they would not vote, 33% were uncertain and 53% said they would vote).

(3) Also during the Wolesi Jirga’s plenary session on 25 September 2017, Shekiba Hashemi, an MP from Kandahar and now a member of Mehwar-e Mardom, joined in the chorus, claiming that the government wanted to make former electoral chief officer Zia ul Haq Amarkhel as the Wolesi Jirga speaker by getting 151 candidates elected in the next parliamentary elections. She further alleged that the disputes among the IEC members (more on this below) stemmed from meddling by the government. On 16 September 2017, Sadiqi Zada Nili, an MP from Daikundi province, claimed that meetings were held night and day between the IEC and “parts of the government” to discuss who should be the next MPs.

In conversation with AAN, another MP also claimed that he had an authentic document showing that the IEC chairman and Amarkhel had developed a list of the next would-be MPs from each province, based on an ethnic quota, with a two-pronged objective to elect a Pashtun and pro-president majority that would also be able to elect Amarkhel as the next Wolesi Jirga speaker.

(4) A leading member of the Ankara Coalition told AAN that the High Council of Jihadi and National Parties, which is a pro-Ghani group, opted out of the Understanding Council at the last minute. On 8 October 2017, Abbas Basir, head of its secretariat, explained to AAN why:

The [original] idea was to forge some sort of coordination regarding the election. There are two reasons for not joining Shura-ye Tafahum: one, we did not have any intention to form any new current or council, because we are already operating under the High Council of Jihadi and National Parties. Second, there is a difference of opinion in dealing with the elections. We also want transparency and oversight in the election, but the question of changing the commissions and the law is a bit late.

A diplomatic source told AAN that Hezb-e Islami led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at the behest of the Palace persuaded members of the High Council of Jihadi and National Parties to opt out of the Understanding Council. A member of the Coalition for Salvation, however, told AAN on 8 November 2018 that the Palace prevented Mujaddedi’s council from joining the Understanding Council. On 31 October 2017, Hamed Azizi, a spokesman for Hezb, told AAN that the High Council was an independent group and Hezb welcomed its decision not to join the Understanding Council, without rejecting or confirming Hezb’s involvement. Like Basir, Azizi also said that they wanted a serious reform and were not happy with the performance of the IEC and ECC members as well as delays in the elections.

Hekmatyar has recently stood by the government’s side against growing pressure from political groups such as the Coalition for Salvation of Afghanistan. In August 2017, Azizi called the Hezb’s support for the government vis-à-vis the political groups as “creating balance” between the government and the demands of its political oppositions.

Hekmatyar went to the IEC on 4 November 2017 to share his party’s proposals about elections. There he appeared in a joint news conference with IEC members and expressed his support for them against the demand for their dismissal, saying, “Although the current commissions were reconstituted in my absence, I had have my observations but still I suggest that the current election bodies should continue their work and the power transfer should be performed peacefully.”

(5) The demand for an observation council was also picked up by Hezb-e Islami as on 31 October 2017. Its member Amin Karim said that a general council comprised of political parties and influential figures should be formed to oversee the election process. Moreover, more and more groups are joining the bandwagon of criticising the electoral bodies. For instance, on 23 October 2017, Amrullah Saleh, former NDS chief, head of the Green Trend of Afghanistan and a close ally of Chief Executive Abdullah, said that the IEC had “gone down with cancer in infancy.” He warned that political forces were already “considering and practicing their possible responses” to a “fraudulent elections.”

(6) Divisions cracked open in the ECC on 22 October 2017 after its chairman Aziz Ariayi issued a statement saying that the ECC had sacked five senior staff including the deputy head of its secretariat, head of analysis and review department, head of human resources department, documents and communication manager, and staff attendance officer. (see here) The ECC chairman listed 11 reasons for the dismissals, including manipulation of electronic attendance, disobedience of the president’s order and creating obstacles for the ECC’s reform plans. (see here) This laid bare the differences that existed in the EEC as its deputy head, Humaira Haqmal, complained that the decision had been based on “vested interest and tendentious.” The head of its secretariat, Muhammad Ali Setegh, also called the dismissal as “cruel political decision and against the country’s effective laws.”

The ECC chairman earlier, during an event organised by TEFA (which was also attended by the author), on 12 October 2017, said that those who were accused of fraud in the 2014 elections were still in the IEC and ECC and only 12 commissioners had been changed, referring to the seven IEC members and five ECC members. He threatened to resign if the government failed to address the alleged interference, without pointing a finger at any particular group.

(7) The position of IEC CEO had remained vacant for more than two years, since former CEO Zia-ul-Haq Amarkhel resigned from his position in 2014, amid allegations of serious electoral fraud. The secretariat had been run by an acting head. Like the IEC commissioners, the CEO is a very important appointment, which according to article 22.3 of the electoral law, is made by the president from among three candidates proposed by the IEC. On 1 March 2017, President Ghani appointed Muhammad Warimach as head of the IEC secretariat, out of eight candidates he, vice-president Sarwar Danesh and Chief Executive Abdullah had interviewed the previous day. A ninth candidate had been out of the country. Unlike the provision of the electoral law, the introduction of nine candidates for the position came after an initial list of three candidates had become controversial Warimach has completed his higher education in India and worked in the office of the former chairman of the IEC, Yusuf Nuristani.

(8) Article 16 (paragraph one) of the electoral law says that an IEC member can be dismissed for the following reasons:

• Faking of the educational documents.
• Deprivation of civil rights on the order of a competent court.
• Conviction for committing crimes of misdemeanor or felony.
• Having membership in political parties during membership of the Commission.
• Breaching provisions of the Constitution of Afghanistan, this law and other laws enforced in the country.
• Suffering from an incurable or long-lasting disease which impedes performance of duties.
• Continuous absence from job for more than twenty days without justifiable legal reasons.
• Non-observance of provisions of Article 17 of this law.

Paragraph five of the article also says that in addition to these conditions, other conditions shall been determined by the Commission. The IEC reportedly demanded the dismissal based on this paragraph.

Based on this article (16.3), in this case (or in the case of resignation or death of an IEC member) the president should appoint a new member from the list of the remaining candidates introduced by the selection committee, as per article 14 of the law, according to which the Selection Committee, from among the candidates for the IEC membership, introduces “21 persons to the president that meet the highest and most appropriate legal standards, while taking into consideration the ethnic and gender composition.” The president then appoints seven out of these 21 candidates. Paragraph four of article 16 further says that if the dismissed (or resigned or deceased) member is also the chairman or deputy or secretary of the IEC, there should be a new internal election by the IEC.

(9) Article 109 of the constitution reads:

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.

(10) Article 90 of the constitution reads:

The National Assembly shall have the following duties: 1. Ratification, modification or abrogation of laws or legislative decrees; 2. Approval of social, cultural, economic as well as technological development programs; 3. Approval of the state budget as well as permission to obtain or grant loans; 4. Creation, modification and or abrogation of administrative units; 5. Ratification of international treaties and agreements, or abrogation of membership of Afghanistan in them; 6. Other authorities enshrined in this Constitution.

(11) Article 104 of the electoral law fleshes out the postponement and suspension of elections as follow:

1) In case, security situations, natural disasters and other similar conditions make impossible the principle of general and fair representation in holding elections and or undermine the credibility of the electoral process; the elections shall be upon the proposal of the Commission and endorsement of the Committee, comprised of the Head and members of the National Security Council, Chairmen of the two houses of the Parliament, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Chairman of the Independent Commission of Oversight of Implementation of the Constitution of Afghanistan be postponed from the specific date for a period of up to four months.

2) In case, situation and conditions mentioned in paragraph 1 of this article are not resolved within the period of four months, the Committee may extend the mentioned period for a period of another four months.

3) Decision of the committee mentioned in paragraph 1 of this article is made by majority of votes of its members.

4) In case, situation mentioned in paragraph 1 of this article is limited to one or more electoral constituencies, the Committee may postpone holding elections in those particular electoral constituencies till the removal of those conditions and improvement of the situation.

5) In case, the elections are proved as defective in an electoral constituency, the Commission may order conducting new elections in that particular electoral constituency.

6) In case, elections are postponed or suspended, members of the elected bodies mentioned in this law, shall continue to serve in their positions until holding of elections and announcement of its results.

 

More opium was grown and more opium paste produced in Afghanistan in 2017 than in any year since the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) began monitoring in 1994. The UNODC’s annual Afghanistan Opium Survey, released today, has shown that 328,000 hectares of land were used to grow poppy this year, an increase of almost a half on the previous record year (2014). Opium poppy cultivation has also expanded to more provinces which were previously poppy-free. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica has been looking at the survey.

The statistics of increase

The hike in poppy cultivation in 2017, an increase of 104,000 hectares, compared to the previous high of 224,000 hectares in 2014 (see here), was startling. Afghanistan produced more opium paste than ever before, some 9,000 metric tons according to the latest UNODC estimate (as compared to 4,800 metric tons in 2016; full text here). The increase in production, although mainly a result of the increase in area under opium poppy cultivation, was also driven by a slightly better harvest (average yield per hectare was given as 27.3 kg/ha, a 15 per cent increase from 2016). As a result of  the increased supply, the good yields brought more cash to farmers, despite the price of opium dropping in all regions at harvest-time (in the south prices though only dropped in the months after the harvest), in response to the increased supply. The average price of fresh opium in 2017 at the time of harvest was 131 US dollars/kg, down 14 per cent, from 152 USD/kg in 2016. Nevertheless, even after that harvest time drop in prices, the farm-gate value of the crop increased by 55 per cent in 2017, as compared to 2016 (because of the sheer volume of production). The farm gate value estimate in 2017 was equivalent to roughly seven per cent of Afghanistan’s estimated GDP, or around 1.4 billion USD, (see also this AAN analysis about the opium economy here).

Opium cultivation also expanded to new provinces in 2017 (more on this below), while government-led eradication was still negligible, although there was more than in 2016 (355 hectares of opium poppy were eradicated in seven provinces in 2016, compared to 750 hectares in 14 provinces, this year).

Where was opium poppy cultivated in 2017?

According to the UNODC report, most cultivation (60 per cent) took place in the south of the country. Strong increases were also observed in other major poppy-cultivating provinces:

In Helmand province alone, cultivation increased by 63,700 hectares (+79 per cent) which accounted for about half of the total national increase. Strong increases were observed also in Balkh (+10,000 hectares or almost five times more than in 2016), Kandahar (+7,500 hectares or +37 per cent), Nimroz (+6,200 hectares or +116 per cent), and Uruzgan (+6,000 hectares or +39 per cent).

Cultivation also expanded to provinces where opium has not been grown for a number of years. This includes Ghazni which had no poppy cultivation since 1995 and Samangan and Nuristan where this was the case since 2007; all three now feature in the Opium Survey. This means that in 2017, 24 out of 34 provinces in Afghanistan grew poppy, compared with 21 opium-growing provinces in 2016.

In the northern region (Baghlan, Balkh, Bamyan, (1) Faryab, Jawzjan, Samangan and Sar-e Pul), the UNODC noted a rapid expansion of opium poppy cultivation since 2014. “In 2014, a total of 574 hectares was cultivated in three out of seven provinces (Baghlan, Faryab and Sar-e Pul),” said the report. “In 2017, only one province remained poppy-free (Bamyan) and some 43,000 hectares were cultivated in the other six provinces.” This estimate for the northern region, however, includes the major poppy-cultivating Ghormach district, now in Faryab province, but until 2016 part of Badghis province, in UNODC terms, in the ‘western region’; this makes comparability with previous years for the northern region of limited value. (2)

UNODC said there were a variety of reasons for the rise and spread of poppy cultivation, including political instability, lack of government control and government corruption, insecurity, lack of assured access to physical and economic markets for farmers to sell alternative products, limited alternative opportunities for them for social and economic development and possibly, the lower engagement of the international aid community country-wide. In this context, it is worth looking at Helmand, a spectacular example of opium production, in more detail.

The Helmand example

In Helmand, the increase in poppy cultivation was so momentous that a third of the arable land was dedicated to opium poppy in 2017, compared to 20 per cent in 2016. This sharp increase, according to the UNODC report, was trigged by several factors, including good yields in 2015 and 2016 and greater labour availability. “In the past years,” its report said, “there have been reports of a lack of workers, caused by the on-going fights within Helmand.” Growing poppy is labour intensive with large number of skilled labourers coming to Helmand from other provinces and even from neighbouring countries for seasonal work. In past years, said UNODC, insecurity “may have led opium poppy farmers to restrict their investments in opium poppy cultivation to avoid the risk of unharvested fields.” In 2017, however, it said that “the perception of greater stability might have led to better availability of cheaper labour for harvesting.”

UNODC does not elaborate on what it means by ‘greater stability’. Possibly it refers to the situation that, after the Taleban took control of much of the province in 2015 and 2016 (see AAN reporting here and here), fighting has recently concentrated around the provincial capital of Lashkargah and some district centres, mainly nearby and along the main Kandahar-Heart highway, leaving most other rural areas, now behind Taleban ‘frontlines’, uncontested (see some media reports here, here and here).

Helmand has also seen a continuing trend of farmers investing in advanced agricultural methods, including solar panels for powering irrigation pumps and specific fertilizers and pesticides. These have allowed Helmandi farmers to grow opium profitably, even under unfavourable conditions. This was also shown in the latest AREU study by Afghan opium expert, David Mansfield who finds other reasons for the sharp increase in cultivation. Having studied the opium ban inside the ‘Helmand Food Zone’ (HFZ) – an area in canal-irrigated central Helmand where the United Kingdom and United States’ governments funded a project to the tune of 12 to 18 millions USD per year between 2008 and 2018 aimed at rapidly and significantly reducing opium poppy cultivation –, Mansfield observed that while opium cultivation did decrease in the zone, the rise in cultivation in former desert areas had begun to outweigh this reduction as early as 2011.

Most importantly the ban on opium in the canal command area imposed by the HFZ, along with the focus on replacing poppy with wheat, created a mobile labour force skilled in poppy cultivation in search of a livelihood and a place to live. While farmers had already begun to settle the former desert lands north of the Boghra [canal] prior to the HFZ, rates of settlement and the intensity of poppy cultivation both increased following the imposition of the ban in the canal command area.

He further elaborated that:

Once this process of settlement began and households who had previously been landless in the canal command area saw the opportunity to purchase land, build a home and accumulate assets using capital from intensive opium poppy cultivation north of the Boghra, there was going to be little to persuade them to leave. Moreover, the success of these settlers served as an example to others and provided a valuable support network for those that wished to follow.

The British Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) and then governor Gulab Mangal who were behind the HFZ thought the elimination of poppy would “symbolise the extension of government writ… and serve to reduce funding for the Taliban who the… UNODC claimed earned the equivalent of ten percent of the farm-gate value of the opium crop.” Mansfield maps the unintended consequences of the project and how the opium ban and associated decline in the welfare of some farmers in the food zone drove the insurgency as they “fuelled the population’s antipathy to the Afghan state, and thereby hastened the collapse of the government in Helmand following the departure of US and UK military forces in the summer of 2014.” (3) He pointed out that this was “especially true of those areas and populations who did not have a viable alternative to opium production.” The anti-government sentiment in these areas, according to Mansfield, has been driven by the government’s lack of understanding of the ‘rural way of life’.

In 2017 the anti-government sentiment in these areas has been further exacerbated by the ANDSF [Afghan National and Defence Security Forces] campaign to retake parts of the districts of Lashkar Gah and Nad e Ali. The timing of this campaign, coinciding with the opium poppy harvest – resulting in both losses of crop and life – as well as the belief that a return of government forces would lead to the return of an opium ban, means the government is largely unwelcome. Disrupting the harvest of any crop – particularly one as input intensive as opium – was always going to lead to the accusation that the government had little understanding of the rural population and its way of life.

“[M]uch greater thought needs to be given to how counterinsurgency and counternarcotic efforts can be de-conflicted,” Mansfield concludes.

Local and global repercussions of the 2017 opium harvest

As AAN previously reported, millions of Afghans rely directly or indirectly on illicit incomes from opiates, as well as its auxiliary products for their economic and social survival. Some estimates, like this one by the Afghan government, put their number at three million. This year’s record cultivation may have led to an increase. Those benefiting range from the landless poor to the well-connected rich (and both Taleban and government-related figures). For the poorest, the expansion of labour-intensive opium production may feel like a godsend. The relationship between opium cultivation and insecurity – that it is a dependable crop especially during conflict – has long been recognised (see this AAN thematic paper on Afghanistan’s drug career). Opium is a low risk crop in a high risk environment and therefore, at a time of insurgency, is viewed by many farmers as the crop of choice. (4)

However, as the UNODC has warned, 2017’s record level of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan will “create multiple challenges for the country.” This and the significant level of illicit trafficking of opiates, it pointed out, will probably further fuel instability and insurgency and increase funding to terrorist groups in Afghanistan (see AAN analysis on the relationship between the Taleban and drug smugglers in border areas here. That it funds both insurgency and criminal and corrupt elements in the government, including some of those planning to run for election, is also well-known.

The UNODC also highlighted the environmental and societal impact the unprecedented levels of cultivation would have on the country:

The expanding illicit economy, that in many provinces has already permeated the rural society to the extent that many communities have become dependent on the income from opium poppy, will further constrain the development of the licit economy and potentially further fuel corruption. The increased levels of opium poppy cultivation also have the potential to exacerbate already existing environmental damage created by the overexploitation of the land for opium, and the increased availability of opium and heroin in the country might further raise the social and economic costs associated with the consumption of opiates for drug users, their families, and for society in general.

Afghanistan’ neighbours and the many other countries that are on the transit routes or destinations of Afghan opiates will also feel the impact of this year’s harvest. Good yields will permit Afghanistan’s narco-networks “to supply increased amounts of high quality, low-cost heroin to consumer markets across the world,” which would likely “increase consumption and its related harms.” To put it simply, in 2018, there will be more illegal opium and heroin in the world than ever seen before. Although, it may be too early to predict whether and by how much heroin prices on streets of Europe and beyond could fall, it is quite possible that price reductions could spur global heroin consumption. Presumably, this much opium and heroin will also spur local consumption; according to the 2015 Afghanistan National Drug Use Survey, between 2.5 and 2.9 million Afghans are believed to use drugs and some 1.5 million Afghans are believed to be regular drug users (see also this AAN analysis).

Whether considering drug addiction at home or abroad, the prospect of having fair elections with a sprawling drugs economy as a source of funding, the chances for getting rid off corrupt elements in government or disrupting Taleban funding, Afghanistan’s 2017 bumper harvest of opium is bad news. What to do about the country’s poppy cultivation – short of moving to a peaceful, stable Afghanistan ­– continues to be, however, not clear at all.

 

Edited by Kate Clark and Thomas Ruttig

 

 

(1) UNODC puts Bamyan into the northern region, although it usually is counted as part of the Central Highlands or the larger central region.

(2) The administrative tussle over to which province Ghormach belongs dates back at least to 2007, when it was reportedly transferred temporarily to Faryab province, although the district historically has belonged to Badghis province. Its administrative transfer had been pushed by ISAF, as the Spanish troops based in Badghis’s provincial centre saw themselves unable to reach the faraway district, so the Norwegians based in Faryab took control of it. The transfer, however, was never acknowledged by Faryab’s provincial governor, who preferred to keep his province opium poppy free in order to receive money from the Good Performance Initiative funding which has been provided by the US government through the Ministry of Counter Narcotics, to provinces that cultivated none or less that 100 hectares of opium poppy (see AAN analysis about Badghis province and administrative issues concerning Ghormach district here).

The comparability of the totals of 2016 and 2017 in the northern region is limited due to this administrative altercation of Ghormach district, UNODC warned.

(3) US troops are back by now, although in lower numbers (see for example here).

(4) Even in easier times, opium does not always behave according to standard market rules of supply and demand. Like other crops, it can be sold to provide an income, but when dried, it stores for five to seven years without losing all its value, so it also functions as capital and savings. Even during wartime, the market for opium still functions. Farmers who grow licit crops have to get them to market, risking their year’s income travelling through frontlines and checkpoints. If they grow opium, the buyers come to them. It is a lot safer.

The Taleban have failed either to re-enlist or to eliminate a dissident commander in Jawzjan who, as a result of internal Taleban conflicts over territorial control and taxation, has aligned himself with Daesh. A recent military offensive – in which fighters from several provinces were mobilised – remained unsuccessful in the second half of October. As a result, another area in Afghanistan could well emerge as a potential IS foothold – although it is still unclear what the exact nature of the links are between the local command and ‘IS Central’ in Syria/Iraq or its Afghan counterpart in Nangarhar, called ISKP. Obaid Ali looks at the current military constellation in this area and possible consequences for the war in Afghanistan (with input by Thomas Ruttig and Jelena Bjelica).

This dispatch is part of series on the non-Pashtun Taleban in the north (for the Tajik Taleban read our previous analysis here and for the Uzbek Taleban read here, here, and here).

During the second half of October 2017, the Taleban deployed hundreds of fighters in Jawzjan province to retake areas under the control of Qari Hekmat, a disgruntled Taleban commander. In 2015 as a result of intra-Taleban conflicts about territorial control and taxation (read AAN’s previous analysis here), Hekmat – the Taleban’s former shadow district governor in his home district Darzab – declared himself and his fighters part of the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan-Pakistani division of the so-called Islamic State (called Daesh by Afghans) centred in Iraq and Syria (for background about its emergence see AAN’s dossier here). Since then, Hekmat has had almost full control over his home district of Darzab in the remote south of Jawzjan, near the border with Faryab and Sar-e Pul. There is no Taleban presence in this district anymore, and Afghan government forces are limited to the district government office as well as to a few bases nearby.

In early October, Hekmat’s fighters went on the offensive and overran most Taleban positions in neighbouring Qush Tepa district. This included the Taleban’s district headquarters located there; this district and Darzab are also under one local Taleban military committee.

According to a Taleban field commander, fighters loyal to Hekmat besieged the Taleban in the villages of Beg Sar, Khanaqa, Gardan and Shir Beg in Qush Tepa at the beginning of October. The local Taleban, he said, retreated to the Astana area of neighbouring Dawlatabad district in Faryab. On 21 October, the Taleban conducted an unsuccessful counteroffensive against Hekmat’s network that continued for five consecutive days. According to locals, while the Taleban were able to re-take a number of villages for a short while, Hekmat’s fighters returned during some of the more recent clashes. Eventually, the Taleban once again retreated to Dawlatabad.

The offensive followed various failed attempts by the Taleban to negotiate Qari Hekmat’s return to the movement. This was driven by their interest in preventing large-scale fighting that might attract attention at both the local and national level. They were particularly keen to avoid infighting among the Uzbek community, which the Taleban only successfully courted relatively recently, ten years ago. This allowed them to successfully establish strong footholds in the Afghan north (for more background detail read this AAN’s report, page 53).

How seriously the Taleban take the challenge posed by Qari Hekmat is reflected by the fact that they mobilised fighters from several provinces against him, from neighbouring Faryab and Sar-e Pul, as well as from faraway Ghor, Badghis and Helmand. The deployment of those fighters, however, is also an indication of their weak leadership at the local level. It was apparently due to their failure in handling Hekmat that the movement replaced the shadow provincial governor along with a number of commanders at the beginning of October. Since promoting the former shadow governor and head of the military committee in the northwest, Mawlawi Abdulrahman, to member of the Taleban’s leadership council, the movement has faced serious challenges in Jawzjan. Abdulrahman, a loyal Taleban figure in the northwest who served as head of the chamber of commerce in Herat province during the Taleban’s Emirate in the 1990s held much sway among local fighters, not only in Jawzjan but also in the northwest. According to a field commander, his successor Mawlawi Sunnatullah, who had previously served as a mid-level commander in Darzab district in Jawzjan, is incapable of leading the Taleban in the province as was reflected by the deployment of external fighters to take on Qari Hekmat.

A three-way conflict

Neither the government nor the Taleban had much influence in the remote districts of Qush Tepa or Darzab. Both districts, in fact, had been controlled by Qari Hekmat on behalf of the Taleban until 2014. The Taleban mainly used this area as a safe haven for fighters from neighbouring Faryab and Sar-e Pul, as government forces – their only adversary before Qari Hekmat’s dissidence – were too weak and incapable of engaging the militants in battle due to a shortage of personnel. They merely kept watch on Hekmat’s activities in these remote districts. The same was true for the Taleban as long as Qari Hekmat did not openly break with them. After his removal from the Taleban’s ranks, the area slipped out of the movement’s control entirely.

With Qari Hekmat’s emergence as an actor independent of and in conflict with the Taleban, and now officially aligned with ISKP, the fighting in this part of Jawzjan has turned into a three-way conflict. At the moment, the government seems to be the weakest party in this triangle. Most of the fighting, as government officials have confirmed, happens between the Taleban and Qari Hekmat’s fighters.

Aminullah, the government’s district governor in Darzab, told AAN, that “due to fears of the fall of the district centre into the hands of either Daesh or the Taleban, government offices have been moved to the provincial centre.” Schools have also remained shut over the past two years. For commander Ismail, Darzab district’s police chief, the security forces are not in a position to conduct a counterattack against militants in the district. He told AAN “We can’t put the lives of our soldiers at risk because there are not enough forces and no timely logistical supply from the central government, if we conduct a counteroffensive against the militants.” Qush Tepa faces similar challenges, limited security personnel and a lack of basic facilities, as well as regular clashes between the Taleban and Hekmat’s fighters. Dozens of families have been forced to flee the area due to recent fighting.

For Qari Hekmat, the location of the two districts he controls is a double-edged sword. It provides a stronghold for him that is out of reach both of the government and, to an extent, the Taleban. But the area is also land-locked, and Qari Hekmat faces two enemies who could mobilise far more resources than what is available to him. The government is stronger in the north of the province around the capital Shebarghan; the Taleban also control some areas in the northern districts (Khamab and Mingajik), as well as in the east of the province (Aqcha, Mardyan and Khaniqa districts; see earlier AAN reporting here). They also keep a presence nearby and still have more military resources.

Meanwhile, the only ISKP stronghold is far away in eastern Afghanistan and under heavy pressure both from the ANSF and US forces. The ISKP cannot, therefore, interfere in Qari Hekmat’s affairs, and neither can it send much help (if it is capable of doing so at all, which is in doubt); and might be happy to portrait his successful activities in the north as their own. In 2016, an attempt to establish contact failed when the Taleban caught and killed an ISKP delegation in Darzab district on its way to meet Hekmat. It is not clear whether that was a unique attempt; in any case, AAN has not heard about any follow-up.

Whether Qari Hekmat plans to expand his influence or his anti-Taleban October offensive was purely a form of ‘forward defence’ to stabilise his grip is unclear. As attempts by a like-minded, disgruntled Taleban commander in nearby Sar-e Pul province to contact him demonstrate (AAN reporting here), there are potential allies in this region of Afghanistan.

Qari Hekmat’s control over Qush Tepa and Darzab may also help him to rise funds from the poppy production in both districts. While Jawzjan province was officially ‘poppy free’ (meaning less than 100 hectares were cultivated with poppy) between 2008 and 2015, figures were significantly higher in 2016. According to UNODC data, there were 85 hectares under poppy cultivation in Darzab in 2016 and 316 hectares in Qush Tepe, for a combined total of 401 hectares – this is 98 per cent of the 409 hectares under poppy cultivation in Jawzjan. The total poppy production for Jawzjan was estimated at 14 metric tons; with the average regional farm-gate price for dry opium at 126 US dollars per kilogram, the value of two district’s total production will have amounted to 1,730,000 US dollars.

Poppy cultivation in Qush Tepe seems to have thrived under Taleban control, but also in Darzab under Qari Hekmat, after he declared himself part of ISKP. (1) This is remarkable insofar as ISKP usually cracks down on the drugs business. The new 2017 UNODC estimates expected for early this week will show whether Qari Hekmat will follow this line or deviate from it – which, in turn, would be an indicator for his commitment to ISKP policies.

How much of an ISKP connection is there?

The exact nature of Qari Hekmat’s affiliation both with IS Central and its self-declared (and accepted) Afghan-Pakistani affiliate, ISKP, is hard to confirm. Qari Hekmat has declared himself a part of ISKP by having his fighters use the ISKP banner when collecting taxes and by issuing decrees with the ISKP logo and letterheads, as two recent ones, from June and August 2017 (see example below), show.

Whether he has sworn allegiance to IS Central is unclear. According to Sharia, if the caliph is not accessible (in this case far away and in hiding somewhere in the Middle East), the declaration can take place in front of a representative of the caliphate. In the case of Qari Hekmat, this would have to be a leader of ISKP, as an accepted branch of the IS. But AAN has not seen any video or statement showing Qari Hekmat’s oath of allegiance or an official confirmation by ISKP or IS Central. In this light, his use of ISKP insignia might just be a tool to threaten the Taleban and the population under his rule, without reflecting much about his real allegiance (see also “Daesh branding as an opportunity” in this AAN analysis).

Consequences for the Taleban

Qari Hekmat’s successfully clinging to Darzab and Qush Tepe, however, is already highly consequential to the Taleban. Their failure to defeat him – at least for the time being, and with such an enormous mobilisation effort – presents the movement with at least two serious problems.

First, Hekmat’s success to hold and consolidate his position against a large Taleban force threatens to reverse important gains in an important part of the country that were the result of a more inclusive policy vis-à-vis the local ethnic majorities. In Jawzjan’s case, these are the Uzbeks who, countrywide, are a minority in Pashtun-dominated Afghanistan and in the Pashtun-dominated Taleban movement. Among them only a limited number of field commanders supported the Taleban during the movement’s first incarnation, from 1994 to 2001. More recently, however, the Taleban in Jawzjan have appointed local non-Pashtuns to most of the movement’s provincial leadership posts, which seems to have strengthened their grip. In Qari Hekmat’s case, however, they now face a reversal in territorial gains (control over two districts) and political gains (as someone else, namely ISKP, might harvest the results of their work).

The fact that Qari Hekmat has held out successfully against the latest Taleban offensive will have also boosted his reputation in the area.

Secondly, and more importantly, this is the first time that a rival group in the north has successfully challenged the Taleban while invoking the name of their latest nemesis, Daesh. Elsewhere, the Taleban have quickly suppressed the attempts of ISKP sympathisers to establish a foothold. In various locations in northern and northeastern Afghanistan, such as Eshkamesh district of Takhar and Burka district of Baghlan province, commanders suspected of sympathising with ISKP have either been dismissed or detained early on (read our previous analysis here and here). The same happened elsewhere in the country in 2014/15, after dissident Taleban groups saw the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as an opportunity to seek new affiliation and funds. The Taleban moved quickly to crush them in Helmand, Farah, Zabul and Logar (AAN background here) and were only unsuccessful in Nangarhar (AAN background here) where fighting between both sides continues (see a media report here). But this was in their Pashtun heartland, and reinforcements were easier to mobilise.

For Daesh Central and ISKP, who are suspected of claiming attacks they sometimes have not conducted, both in Afghanistan and internationally, it would be a prestigious step forwards if Qari Hekmat could hold out against the Taleban in their name over a longer period. Whether they have anything practical to do with Qari Hekmat’s campaign or not, they would be able to claim to own another area in Afghanistan. Finally, it looks unlikely that the Taleban will give up and simply accept Qari Hekmat’s ‘island’ of the two Jawzjan districts as being outside their control.

The recent Taleban offensive against self-declared Daesh commander Qari Hekmat in Jawzjan also undermines claims made on 8 October by General Razeq, the police chief of Kandahar province, that Taleban leader Hebatullah Akhundzada had asked his fighters to avoid clashes with Daesh (read media report here).

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Thomas Ruttig

 

(1) The figures for the poppy cultivation area in Darzab district are as follows: 625 ha in 2004; 272 ha in 2005; 16 ha in 2006; 803 ha in 2007, followed by the ‘poppy free’ period between 2008 and 2015. The only poppy cultivation recorded for Qush Tepe between 2001 and 2015 was in 2007, with 43 ha.

 

In October 2017, Afghans experienced another particularly violent period. A series of high-profile insurgent attacks took place almost simultaneously in Kabul and five provinces. Provincial and district centres were targeted, as well as ANSF installations and Sunni and Shia mosques. The overall number of people killed in these attacks is estimated to be over 200, with hundreds more injured. AAN’s Thomas Ruttig (with contributions from Fazal Muzhary and Ehsan Qaane) examines this latest wave of violence, putting it into the context of security trends so far this year. He concludes that there is no ‘stalemate’ in the Afghan conflict, as has been observed elsewhere. On the contrary, the situation remains extremely dynamic and volatile.

Within four days, between 16 and 19 October, the Taleban carried out a number of high-profile attacks on Afghan government forces installations and convoys in three major provinces: Ghazni, Paktia and Kandahar. Furthermore, gunmen attacked congregations in mosques in Kabul city and Ghor province. These attacks caused substantial casualties among both Afghan government forces and civilians, as well as extensive damage.

This latest wave of attacks brought to an end a long,comparatively low-key and not overly successful Taleban offensive this year. (Each spring, after Nowruz, the Afghan New Year, the Taleban announce their annual offensive. This year’s was codenamed Omari, in memory of the movement’s founder Mullah Muhammad Omar (read here; AAN background here).

One specific feature stood out in many of the attacks on the Afghan forces’ installations, which was that the use of US-made armoured Humvee vehicles captured from the Afghan forces, which the Taleban then turned into car bombs in order to breach military fortifications.

The latest wave of attacks: what happened and when?

16 October 2017: Andar (Ghazni)

The first attack took place on Monday 16 October, when the Taleban moved against Andar district centre, just outside the provincial capital of Ghazni. They attacked a police post near the district’s administrative compound and then the compound itself with car bombs. Ghazni’s governor, Abdul Karim Matin, said that during the attack a Humvee rigged with explosives was used as a driving bomb. (The Taleban subsequently sent a statement to the media, saying it was a normal lorry.) The insurgents were not immediately able to capture Andar’s centre, but laid siege to it. Three days of clashes followed, during which the Taleban briefly managed to capture the district centre but were quickly driven out by Afghan forces supported by US airstrikes.

At least 28 security personnel were killed and 18 others wounded during the fighting, according to provincial police chief General Muhammad Zaman Khosti. It is not clear whether this included the seven police killed when a reinforcement convoy headed to Andar was ambushed. At least five civilians were also killed. Khosti further claimed that 69 militants, including their ‘red unit special forces’ commander, had been killed and 17 others injured. Governor Matin spoke of 90 Taleban fighters and 22 security forces having been killed.

17 October 2017: Gardez (Paktia)

The next day, on 17 October, Taleban suicide bombers and gunmen stormed the police-training centre in Paktia’s provincial capital, Gardez, which also housed the police’s and the army’s regional headquarters. According to local sources, the attackers used captured unarmoured police vehicles (of the Ranger type), which they filled with explosives in their first assault, followed by a similarly kitted-out Humvee during a second one. They killed at least 41 people, including provincial police chief Toryalai Abdiani, and completely destroyed the installation. The government have promised to build a new one.

The attack happened in a province that had otherwise appeared to be relatively calm, except for fighting around the district centre of Janikhel in August (AAN analysis here) and an airstrike against insurgents in Ahmad Aba (sometimes called Ahmadabad) district, adjacent to Gardez, during which another Humvee captured by the Taleban was reportedly destroyed.

As a result of the Gardez attack, the total number of casualties, including attackers and civilians, was estimated to be over 80 dead and some 200 wounded. This is not the first time the training centre has been targeted. In mid-June 2017, it was hit by a so-called ‘complex attack’, killing half a dozen security forces. The Afghan interior ministry described the 17 October attack as the “biggest terrorist attack” in 2017 – but there were more to come.

18-19 October 2017, Maiwand (Kandahar)

During the night of 18 and 19 October, the Taleban used two captured Humvees as vehicle-borne bombs to penetrate a major military base, Chashmo, just outside Kandahar city in Maiwand district. The attackers, reportedly dressed in security forces uniforms, overran the base, destroyed it completely and wiped out almost its entire garrison. Of those Afghan soldiers, 43 were killed, nine more wounded and six were unaccounted for, assumed to have either been taken prisoner or to have defected.

Maiwand lies at the heart of the region, where the Taleban movement emerged in the mid-1990s. It is still one of its strongholds and the Taleban recently made further inroads here. (According to the terrorism watch blog, The Long War Journal, as early as in spring 2017, the Taleban controlled five of 18 districts in Kandahar province and heavily contested another four.)

On the same day, although much less widely reported, the Taleban used the same method – detonating a car bomb and then launching an infantry attack – to attack Jaghatu’s district centre in Maidan-Wardak province. They were, however, reportedly repulsed after several hours of fighting. By mid-September, the Taleban had already  killed three consecutive police chiefs of this district, using road-side bombs.

20 October 2017: mosque attack in Kabul – an outlier; Dolaina (Ghor)

On 20 October, 56 people were killed by a gunman who first shot at worshippers at the Imam Zaman mosque in the predominantly Shia/Hazara-populated Dasht-e Barchi area of West Kabul and then detonated a bomb he had been carrying. This attack was an outlier in the series of Taleban attacks in October, insofar as it was claimed by the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan affiliate of the group centred in the Iraqi-Syrian borderlands. (It was not an outlier in he context of this year’s general patterns of terrorist attacks in Kabul and elsewhere, often directed against the Shia minority and claimed by ISKP – see earlier AAN reporting here and here.)

On the same day, armed men stormed a Sunni mosque in Dolaina district in Ghor province, killing up to 30 people and injuring “dozens” more. Among the dead was a pro-government militia commander, reportedly linked to Jamiat-e Islami, who appears to have been the main target of this attack. It is not clear who was behind the attack, but it also fits into a known pattern. Commanders of similar militia groups (and other government dignitaries) have repeatedly been targeted in mosques or during other social gatherings across the country, where they are particularly vulnerable (see for example here or here; attacks on mosques – although frequent – are still considered taboo among mainstream Muslims). Ghor is known for its particularly confusing pattern of conflicts, involving insurgent groups and ‘freelancing’ militias, the dividing line between which is all but hermetic (see earlier AAN analysis here).

21 October 2017: Kabul

On 21 October, another suicide bomber struck in Kabul. He walked up to a minibus transporting trainees from the Daud Khan military hospital on their way home from the Marshal Fahim Military Academy near its entrance at the Qambar junction on Qargha Road in the northwest of the capital. His attack killed 15 cadets and injured many more (see BBC and Tolonews reporting).

Earlier the same day, at least three rockets were fired “at foreign facilities” in Kabul, apparently without causing any damage. While this is not new, it appears to form part of an increasing pattern of attacks, particularly against Kabul airport. An earlier, more prominent example came in late September 2017, when US defence minister James Mattis visited Kabul and, according to Afghan media, up to 50 rockets were fired from a house near the airport, which had apparently been rented by the Taleban. It remains unclear, however, whether this was done with previous knowledge of Mattis’ visit (which is not unlikely, given that the Taleban probably have informants even in western installations).

Earlier incidents

Large-scale Taleban attacks against Afghan government forces installations are not unprecedented at all, however. This year has seen a series of such raids, which began as early as in April. Then, a ten-member Taleban commando reportedly using two Afghan national army vehicles with license plates from another province managed to enter an army base in the northern centre of Mazar-e Sharif, killing around 170 soldiers who were leaving the base’s mosque after Friday prayers (media reports here and here). The death toll could have been even higher. (Government officials reportedly privately admitted that releasing the actual death toll could undermine the morale of the Afghan army (see for example here).

Over subsequent months, similar attacks took place in the south. Each of them was smaller than the one in Mazar, but casualties added up to concerning numbers.

In May 2017, the Taleban raided Camp Achakzai, an Afghan army base in Shahwali Kot district in Kandahar province, reportedly killing 18 soldiers (media reports here, here and here). In late July, during an attack in Khakrez district, also in Kandahar, 40 Afghan soldiers were killed and many others wounded. In mid-August, at least seven people were killed in a suicide attack in Lashkargah and more than 40 others reportedly wounded, including security forces and civilians. On 28 August, at least 13 people were killed and 19 others wounded, once again including civilians and security personnel, in a suicide attack near Nawa district centre, when a suicide bomber targeted a armoured vehicle of the security forces. This followed the ANSF’s retaking of the district centre in mid-July; Nawa’s centre has remained under Taleban pressure ever since (see for example here and here).

In Farah, in the west of the country, there has been a similar series of such attacks (examples reported in the Afghan media here and here).

Analysing the attacks

‘Humvee bombs’ – a new tactic?

The use of ‘Humvee bombs’ in Andar, Gardez and Maiwand (and in other places – see below) has received much attention in both the international and Afghan media (see for example Reuters, the Los Angeles Times and Kabul-based 1TV). But it is in no way unprecedented.

Southern Afghanistan, and particularly Helmand province, saw a series of similar attacks in 2016 and 2017. This included attacks in early 2016 in the provincial capital, Lashkargah, nearby Babaji and Nowzad district (read here and here) and in Sangin district, in mid-2016 in Lashkargah again, in Gereshk district in July 2017)and in Musa Qala district in August 2017.

In neighbouring Kandahar province, a Humvee was also used during a so-called complex attack on an Afghan security forces base in Maruf district, killing at least 12 security personnel in late September 2017.

The exact number of Humvees captured by the Taleban is unknown. But as early as September 2015, Reuters quoted “officials” saying it was in the “dozens,” while the New York Times wrote in February 2016 “it could be more than 150,” including 50 to 100 in Helmand alone, over 40 taken during the Taleban capture of Kunduz in 2015 and 13 in Badakhshan.In October 2017, the Afghan defence ministry admitted it didnot know how many Humvees had been seized.

On 20 August, the deputy police chief of Farah province, Colonel Muhammad Saleh Massud stated, according to an Afghan media report, that security forces had seized two Humvee vehicles from the Taleban after they had tried to storm Khashrud district centre, at the strategic Zaranj-Delaram highway. The insurgents were eventually pushed back after several hours of fighting. The US Army Times reported “strikes” by a US marines unit based in the Afghan south “to destroy stolen Humvees” in July 2017. The same outlet also reported, with US military personnel as its source, that “in areas of Uruzgan province, the Afghan National Army, or ANA, is afraid to conduct night operations” as the local Taleban have better night vision equipment.

Reactions to the new US policy and attempts to start peace talks?

The wave of attacks has been interpreted, for example, by the BBC, as a possible response to the new US strategy in Afghanistan. Indeed, this upsurge of high-profile attacks came after US President Donald Trump announced his new strategy in August 2017 (AAN analysis here). This includes an increase of up to 4,000 of the US’s own troops, the expansion of the CIA’s involvement, Afghan special and paramilitary forces (AAN analysis here, here and here) – and an increase in pressure on the Taleban’s key ally, Pakistan. Furthermore, several high-ranking US officials – including CIA chief Mike Pompeo and foreign minister Rex Tillerson – have recently stated that US troops would stay at least until the Taleban came to the negotiating table and that the insurgents would not be given the chance to win militarily. The gap of almost two months between the Trump address and the upsurge of Taleban activity might reflect the time needed to prepare such attacks.

The wave of attacks also coincided with various recent attempts to start peace talks, such as the meeting in mid-October of the Quadrilateral Coordination Group – involving government representatives from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the US (but not of the Taleban) in Oman (see media report here). This initiative, which began in 2015, had faltered following the collapse of the Murree talks in August 2015 and after the Taleban did not react to an ultimatum issued by the group to come to the negotiating table within three months in February 2016.

The Taleban now stated they were “not interested” in this initiative (quoted here) but explained in a statement posted on their website on 29 September 2017 that they were not generally opposed to a peaceful solution: “Finding a peaceful solution to the Afghan problem was and is the policy of Islamic Emirate.” In the same statement they accused the government in Kabul of sabotaging the Taleban’s participation in other dialogue fora and had now “spread rumors about closing the [Qatar] office” which it called the movement’s only “authoritative organ” for conducting talks.

Technically, the meeting in Oman cannot be considered ‘peace talks’ but rather preparations in the hope of such talks.

In a second initiative, an Afghan media report said that a group of Afghan politicians not directly in government had been invited to meet Taleban representatives in Dubai this month (November 2017), with the involvement of the Pugwash Conference, an organisation that had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and which had earlier organised similar meetings (see AAN analysis here). (In contrast to earlier meetings, Pugwash denied that it was organising the event – noting instead that it was a mere participant.) Furthermore, the AP’s Kathy Gannon reported in August 2017, that “despite seemingly stalled peace talks” the Afghan intelligence chief and the national security adviser were in regular contact with Taleban representatives, including “about the country’s constitution and political future.” She further stated that she had even seen “documents describing the conversations.” In previous years, such initiatives – as well as US political pressure on Pakistan – have often been accompanied by an intensification in high-profile terrorist attacks.

Ending a stalemate, retaking initiative?

So far in 2017, the Taleban have failed to capture any provincial capital or hold on to most of the district centres they captured temporarily. The Taleban have also lost a number of district centres captured earlier to Afghan forces, for example some in Kunduz and Nawa in Helmand (after holding the latter for nine months).

It also appears that the Taleban have demonstrated a lower degree of military coordination in some parts of the country, as AAN reported from Kunduz province. This is the result of an increase in the number of night raids, drone and other air strikes that have taken out many mid-level commanders and fighters. Therefore, the wave of ‘Humvee attacks’ may simply be the attempt by the Taleban to counter the impression that they have lost momentum.

This has led a number of observers talking about a “stalemate.” This includes the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) who used this term in his most recent reports – which are largely based on US and NATO military sources (see here, p12 and here, p4). A classified German assessment of the security situation in Afghanistan issued in July 2017 and seen by the author mentions that this is the official NATO assessment which has become – and remains – the official language of western actors in the country.

Given the Taleban’s territorial gains between late 2015 and 2016, the movement has indeed been less successful in 2017, particularly during the first half of the year. While between November 2015 and November 2016, as the SIGAR reported in his first 2017 report issued in February (p58), the Afghan government lost 15 per cent of its previously held territory to the Taleban, his July 2017 report noted that “The number of districts under the control of the government … appears to have stabilized at 59.7%, the same as last quarter.”

This changed in the subsequent three months because of new Taleban gains, as the new SIGAR report, published on 30 October 2017, reflected:

As of August 2017, there were 54 districts [of 407] under insurgent control (13) or influence (41), an increase of nine districts over the last six months [up from 11 and 34 in May 2017, plus 122 “contested” districts]. (…) The Afghan government’s district and population control deteriorated to its lowest level since SIGAR began analyzing district-control data in December 2015 and population-control data in September 2016. (2)

As a result of this development, the SIGAR stated:

3.7 million Afghans (11.4% of the population) live in districts under insurgent control or influence (…), while another 8.1 million people (24.9%) live in areas that are contested. (…) The majority, 20.7 million (63.7%), still live in areas controlled or influenced by the government…

Even when there were no large-scale attacks, small-scale fighting took place on an almost daily basis throughout the spring and summer and now into autumn, and often in a number of provinces, simultaneously. This fighting only occasionally made it into the media, but it is reflected in the high number of Afghans displaced by conflict. By mid-October, UNOCHA had registered almost 300,000 new IDPs in 30 of the 34 Afghan provinces, while all 34 provinces host IDPs. There was larger-scale displacement only in 2015 (470,000) and 2016 (almost 600,000) (see AAN reporting here).

Sometimes, small-scale fighting turned into larger-scale fighting. Apart from the south and Kunduz, this was the case in Farah, Parwan, Paktia and Paktika – almost all of it underreported.

In Parwan province, which adjoins Kabul province, the Taleban twice attacked Siahgerd district centre, the first time being in August, and there was sporadic fighting in the area throughout that month. During the second attack, which took place in late September, the Taleban mobilised fighters from three provinces and made their way into Fanduqistan valley – a side valley of the Ghorband in Parwan (earlier AAN analysis here) – and marched on Siahgerd again from there. It took three days of fighting and reinforcements sent by the government to push them back. Occasional clashes were reportedly ongoing in late September as well as into October, indicating that the district was still vulnerable to a Taleban takeover. Meanwhile, in nearby Shibar district in Bamyan, there were reports of a Taleban attack, a rare occurrence in this province. It was apparently part of the Taleban’s Siahgerd operation, with the aim of cutting off one route (from Bamyan) for government reinforcements.

Even heavier and more consistent fighting (also underreported) took place in the more remote province of Farah which borders Iran. Its provincial capital, also called Farah, almost fell to the Taleban three times over the course of the past 12 months, according to the Guardian, for the first time as early as in December 2016. The province has a warm climate, so there is no winter lull in fighting. Farah further saw a brief Taleban takeover of Shebkoh (Qala-ye Kah) district centre in mid-October and two earlier attempts on Khashrud in December 2016 as well as in August this year. Heavy fighting was also reported in Bala Boluk district. The Long War Journal recently assessed that of Farah’s 11 districts, five are under Taleban control and three more heavily contested; it reported more recently that “hundreds of Taleban fighters gather[ed] in the open unopposed” in Bakwa district. (1)

Farah – together with Lashkargah (Helmand), Tirinkot (Uruzgan) and Kunduz – belongs to a group of provincial capitals that the UN, in its special representatives’ report to the Security Council, mentioned as being under heavy pressure by the Taleban. Reporting by AAN and others has shown that there is a similar situation in Sarepul, Faryab and Ghazni as well as repeated fighting in the vicinity of Baghlan’s provincial capital, Pul-e Khumri.

In mid-August, there was another large-scale and underreported Taleban attack on the district centre of Gomal in Paktika in the southeast. Fighting went on for four days, after which the attackers were eventually subdued by government forces and suffered heavy casualties. Almost simultaneously, the Taleban were temporarily able to take over Janikhel’s district centre in neighbouring Paktia, leading to a period of protracted fighting in the area (AAN reporting here).

Although most district centres captured by the Taleban in 2017 have been quickly recaptured by Afghan forces (the SIGAR report notes that recaptures have been quicker on average than last year, p.83), the fact that they were taken at all, and then had to be retaken with considerable effort, indicates that the Taleban still have the military initiative in many parts of the country. Furthermore, while the Taleban may have lost control of certain district centres, they often still control large parts of those districts. For example, as reported by the SIGAR (and based on US military information), this is the case in five of seven of Kunduz’s districts where the Taleban currently do not hold any district centre.

Conclusion: the stalemate is only statistical

The latest wave of Taleban attacks in October 2017 was an attempt to regain momentum and compensate for the fact that their permanent territorial gains remained scarce throughout 2017. But, as the trend between May and August 2017 showed, it is too early to speak of a stalemate. A number of facts speak for this.

First, as shown above, several provincial and districts centres continue to be on the brink of collapse. The 2017 trend in terms of territorial control represents a consolidation of the Taleban’s 2015/16 gains on a higher level then ever before since 2001.

Secondly, fighting is still highly intense. The latest UN report on Afghanistan to the Security Council (published in September 2017) stated that, “The conflict continued unabated throughout the country.” The UN further registered a “record level of armed clashes” during 2017. Subsequently, levels of civilian casualties and IDPs remain high. The same goes for the number of casualties within the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), ie the army and the police.

After ANSF losses of 8,146 dead and 14,278 injured in 2016 according to unpublicised NATO figures seen by AAN, the SIGAR July 2017 report noted 2,531 more ANSF dead and 4,238 injured between 1 January and 8 May 2017 alone. The 2016 figures amounted to 61 casualties a day, double that of UN-registered civilian casualties. The SIGAR called this casualty rate “shockingly high,” “unprecedented” and “unsustainable,” adding that figures provided to the US military by the Afghan authorities might still be “inaccurate,” but this most likely meant “underreported.”

In the introduction to his latest report, the SIGAR reveals that US forces in Afghanistan have, at the Afghan government’s request, “classified or otherwise restricted” information about the ANSF’s performance “such as casualties, personnel strength, attrition, capability assessments, and operational readiness of equipment.” Afghan media and individual Afghan journalists reported about 800 ANSF dead in September and 1,800 in October, which would amount to another rise in casualty figures.

Third, the wave of attacks has demonstrated that the Taleban are still capable of mobilising large numbers of forces across provincial borders and carrying out simultaneous attacks in various provinces. The substantial increase in both US and Afghan airstrikes has not deterred them. (According to US sources, the number of US airstrikes in Afghanistan was 50 per cent higher in September 2017 compared to those in August 2017, and, in absolute numbers, the highest since the battle of Sangin in 2010; media report here.) These attacks, most of which have been carried out by the Taleban, have also showed that they are, militarily, still far more significant than ISKP.

Fourth, the October wave of attacks was not the first this year. It was preceded by an earlier wave in the south and west of the country and by the ‘black week’ in Kabul in late May/early June, which included the 31 May suicide blast that destroyed the German Embassy and killed scores of Afghan civilians. (For this incident, no group has yet claimed responsibility (see the AAN discussion of this issue here).

If this situation represents a stalemate, it is a highly volatile and dynamic one. In any case, as one of the observers who used the term “stalemate,” Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (quoted here) added, this is “a stalemate that favors the insurgents.” In his latest report, the SIGAR also borrowed the UN’s expression of an “eroding stalemate.” Given all sides’ readiness and ability to increase fighting even further, there is no guarantee that this ‘relative’ stalemate will hold.

Edited by Sari Kouvo

AAN will look at some of the Taleban operations mentioned in this text in more detail over the coming weeks.

 

(1) The Long War Journal uses the following criteria:

A “Contested” district means that the government may be in control of the district center, but little else, and the Taliban controls large areas or all of the areas outside of the district center. A “Control” district means the Taliban is openly administering a district, providing services and security, and also running the local courts.

(2) In the SIGAR terminology, ‘insurgency influenced’ stands for ‘predominantly controlled’. There are also ‘contested districts’, ie with both sides in a kind of balance. It was not clear, the SIGAR explained, “whether these districts are at risk or if neither the insurgency nor the Afghan government exercises any significant control over these areas.” Their number, according to SIGAR’s latest report, has remained “mostly unchanged” over the past months.

About the methodology, the SIGAR reported in its April 2016 quarterly report (p95, with a table on p96 with further detail):

According to USFOR-A [US Forces in Afghanistan], the RS mission determines district status by assessing five indicators of stability: governance, security, infrastructure, economy, and communications.

 

International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has requested judicial authorisation to open an investigation into crimes allegedly committed in connection to the Afghan armed conflict. If the judges of the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber agree, there could now be investigations of the Taleban for many types of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and Afghan and United States forces, both for the war crime of torture. Bensouda said the requested investigation would also look into “crimes closely linked to the situation in Afghanistan allegedly committed… on the territory of other States Parties to the Rome Statute,” a reference to the CIA’s use of black sites for torture and interrogation in Poland, Lithuania and Romania. Bensouda’s move has come despite concerted lobbying by Kabul to drop or delay the investigation. Ehsan Qaane and Kate Clark have been looking into what the announcement means and what happens next.

Almost a year since the ICC’s Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) announced, on 14 November 2016, that a decision would be made “imminently” on whether it would request an investigation into crimes allegedly committed on Afghan soil, ICC Prosecutor Bensouda announced her decision:

For decades, the people of Afghanistan have endured the scourge of armed conflict. Following a meticulous preliminary examination of the situation, I have come to the conclusion that all legal criteria required under the Rome Statute to commence an investigation have been met. In due course, I will file my request for judicial authorisation to open an investigation, submitting that there is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed in connection with the armed conflict in Afghanistan. (1)

What has the ICC done so far?

Afghanistan is a state party to the ICC. This means that the court can prosecute individuals of any nationality who are alleged to have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide on Afghan soil. The crimes need to meet ICC’s gravity threshold and the Afghan government needs to be unwilling or unable to prosecute the crimes nationally. The preliminary examination into crimes committed in Afghanistan was initiated in 2007 by the ICC Prosecutor. It was not requested by Afghanistan or the United Nations Security Council which means under the court’s rules that, once the Prosecutor has determines that there is a case or cases to answer, there has to be an additional, preliminary judgement by a panel of judges from the Pre-Trial Chamber. The judges will review the Prosecutor’s request, as well as all the supporting evidence, to ensure that an investigation is merited.

Bensouda has yet to file her request, but the ‘Afghanistan situation’ has been under what is called ‘preliminary examination’ for ten years and the likely direction of the OTP’s case can be seen from earlier reports, particularly the last, the November 2016 Preliminary Examination Report. (For AAN’s analysis of that report, see here, earlier preliminary examination reports here and background information on the ICC and Afghanistan’s situation see AAN’s previous dispatches here and here.) Human Rights Watch has said the move to request an investigation is long overdue.

More than 10 years ago, the court began its preliminary analysis in Afghanistan – the phase to determine whether there are possible ICC crimes and if the court should act. In the meantime, there have been countless summary executions, forced disappearances, acts of torture, and suicide attacks on civilians in the country. These abuses have largely gone unchecked.

What might the ICC investigation cover?

The ICC was established in 2002 and Afghanistan ratified the Rome Statute on 1 May 2003, so the vast majority of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during almost four decades of war in Afghanistan – by the PDPA, mujahedin, Taleban government and Soviet forces – do not fall under ICC jurisdiction. Instead, three parties have been named in the Preliminary Examination: the Taleban, various Afghan government forces and the US military and CIA. If an investigation does go ahead and charges are made, these would be against individuals, not against states or armed groups.

The party to the conflict facing the most serious and multifarious allegations are the Taleban. In the OTP’s November 2016 Preliminary Examination Report, it said there was a reasonable basis to believe that the Taleban and Haqqani network have committed war crimes (murder; intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, humanitarian personnel and protected objects; conscripting children; and killing or wounding treacherously a combatant adversary – all of which, it said, “were committed on a large scale and as part of a plan or policy”) and crimes against humanity (murder; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty and persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political grounds and on gender grounds, all “allegedly committed as part of a widespread and/or systematic attack…” (For the full quote, see paragraphs 206 and 207 of the report.)

The Afghan government also faces an investigation for the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment; outrages upon personal dignity pursuant to article; and sexual violence. In the 2016 Preliminary Examination Report, the OTP named the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan National Police, Afghan National Army, Afghan National Border Police and the Afghan Local Police as alleged perpetrators and said it estimated that 35 to 50 per cent of all conflict-related detainees “may be subjected to torture,” carried out in a “state of total impunity.”

However, the most attention, if an investigation does go ahead, would be on allegations against the US, specifically that members of its intelligence agency, the CIA, and its military, during interrogations of security detainees and in conduct supporting those interrogations, as the 2016 Preliminary Examination Report put it:

… resorted to techniques amounting to the commission of the war crimes of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape… Specifically:

Members of US armed forces appear to have subjected at least 61 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity on the territory of Afghanistan between 1 May 2003 and 31 December 2014. The majority of the abuses are alleged to have occurred in 2003-2004.

Members of the CIA appear to have subjected at least 27 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape on the territory of Afghanistan and other States Parties to the Statute (namely Poland, Romania and Lithuania) between December 2002 and March 2008. The majority of the abuses are alleged to have occurred in 2003-2004.

Crucially, the OTP said these “alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals,” but rather were part of a policy:

The Office considers that there is a reasonable basis to believe these alleged crimes were committed in furtherance of a policy or policies aimed at eliciting information through the use of interrogation techniques involving cruel or violent methods which would support US objectives in the conflict in Afghanistan.

The OTP has decided that thresholds of admissibility have been reached, ie the alleged crimes are under ICC jurisdiction, are sufficiently grave and are not being addressed by domestic or other legal bodies.

What is the Afghan government’s position?

It was only after the dissemination of the 2016 preliminary examination report that the Afghan government finally and belatedly began to communicate directly with the ICC. The government’s main aim was to convince the ICC that it was willing and able to prosecute war crimes nationally. The Afghan government sent two delegations to The Hague discuss cooperation (one in December 2016 and one in January 2017) and also informed the court of examples of national prosecutions and new laws. For example, it sent 15 cases including the cases of Anas Haqqani and Hafiz ul-Rashid, two senior members of the Haqqani network who are in Afghan government custody (for more details, see AAN’s previous dispatch).

The government also took several anti-torture measures. Torture was already illegal in multiple ways, including under the Afghan constitution, but nonetheless, in March 2017, the government also adopted some new measures. A new Torture Law and added the crimes listed in the Rome Statute, word for word, into its newly approved Penal Code. The Penal Code was approved by presidential decree on 4 March 2017 and is due to come into force on 14 February 2018. It makes the perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide punishable by prison terms of up to 30 years, execution and/or compensating victims. More details of these new measures can be read about in AAN’s analysis of Afghanistan’s submission to the expert committee monitoring compliance with the UN Torture Convention, which met in April 2017.

However, the government’s new measures have had, as yet, no impact on what actually happens to conflict-related detainees. This was made clear in UNAMA’s most recent report on the subject, also published in April 2017 (read AAN analysis here which found the prevalence of torture had increased since its previous report in 2015 (39 per cent of detainees interviewed had been tortured, compared to 31 per cent) and a “pervasive culture of impunity” with torturers facing little risk even of disciplinary action, let alone being prosecuted.

Moreover, it is difficult for the Afghan government to claim it is ready and able to prosecute (not just government torturers, but alleged Taleban war criminals), as long as the Amnesty Law is in force. The law gives an amnesty to anyone who perpetrated war crimes before 2001 and any perpetrator since who reconciles with the government. The Amnesty Law was used in the OTP’s preliminary examination reports as evidence that Kabul is not willing or able to prosecute.

Afghanistan could have prosecuted perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the period of the preliminary examination, making an ICC intervention unnecessary. The Afghanistan situation was under OTP scrutiny for ten years, making it the second longest preliminary examination after Colombia’s, which began in 2004. If the Afghan government had taken the ICC seriously and prosecuted some of the major perpetrators of the crimes under the court’s jurisdiction, Kabul might at least have won itself the same chance Colombia has. Bogota proved to the ICC that it was investigating and prosecuting the perpetrators in national courts and a full investigation was postponed.

Since November 2016, efforts have been made to get the investigation dropped or delayed. Nader Nadery, Afghanistan’s focal point for the ICC, told AAN in October 2017 that a meeting between President Ashraf Ghani and Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on 22 September 2017 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York had gone well. In the meeting, Ghani reportedly told Bensouda that “morally he is on the side of the ICC [to provide justice for war victims], but legally he is not.” He added that Bensouda’s arguments about the “admissibility of cases” were not convincing. AAN was also told by a government source that Kabul tried to argue that the court’s intervention would harm the Afghan ‘peace process’ (what that might be was not clear) and would have a negative, although unspecified impact on the presence of international troops in its county. The result, the source said, would be instability and greater violence in the country. In other words, Kabul tried to argue that an ICC intervention would not be in in the ‘interest of justice’, ie the interests of the victims (a reason for an investigation not to go ahead, according to the Rome Statute).

The government’s attempts since November 2016 to present itself as both willing and able to prosecute will have had to have been considered by the OTP before it could take any further step, according to the provision of the Rules of Procedures and Evidence of the ICC. This might have been why the OTP spent a year considering whether to request authorisation from the Pre-Trial Chamber for an investigation. Nevertheless, those efforts have failed.

There has not been any official comment from the Afghan government as yet. However, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) has welcomed the OTP’s decision, saying on 4 November 2017 that it “believes that supporting and providing justice by using any domestic and international mechanism is crucial to end impunity, prosecute perpetrators and bring justice for victims.” It called on the government to fulfil its obligations according to the Rome Statute and fully assist the ICC. An Afghan pressure group, the Transitional Justice Coordination Group (TJCG), a network of 26 individuals and civil society organisations, called on the Pre-Trial Chamber to authorise the investigation and urged the government to help ICC investigators and protect victims and witnesses. It said justice could help build a sustainable peace in the country (press statement released on 5 November 2017 which AAN has a soft copy of).

What is the US position?

Former President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but did not submit it for Senate ratification. His successor, George Bush, American president when the ICC was founded in 2002, said the US would not join it. He also established what opponents have called the ‘Hague Invasion Act’, the 2002 American Service Members Protection Act which prohibits cooperation with the ICC and allows the president to authorise military force to free any American military personnel held by it. President Obama re-established a working relationship with the ICC, with the US as an observer. However, the Rome Statue remains unratified by Washington.

Even so, because Afghanistan is a member of the ICC, the ICC has jurisdiction over American personnel in Afghanistan. This is despite the 2014 US-Afghan Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) (see analysis here which stipulates that members of US forces “may not be surrendered to, or otherwise transferred to, the custody of an international tribunal or any other entity or state without the express consent of the United States.” Rather the US has the “exclusive right to exercise jurisdiction” over them. Under the Rome Statute, there is a provision for an agreement like the SOFA to excuse the Afghan government from arresting US citizens or surrendering them to the court. However, they do not protect US nationals who may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity on Afghan soil from being investigated, charged and put on trial. (2)

The US cannot argue that it is able and willing to prosecute the war crime of torture, nationally. The use of torture by US personnel was authorised by the Bush administration in 2002 and although President Obama banned its use when he took office in 2009, his administration decided not to prosecute anyone. “We tortured some folks,” said Obama. “You know, it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.” President Trump has praised the use of torture saying he liked waterboarding “…a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough.” Even if it did not work, he said, he would authorise it because “they deserve it anyway for what they do to us.”

At the individual level, the US record on prosecuting those accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity has been poor, as AAN commented in a major report on transitional justice and reconciliation in Afghanistan:

The US military seldom publicizes the results of investigations into specific abuses, including torture, deaths in detention and indiscriminate or disproportionate use of force during ground operations. In the majority of cases, there is little indication that anyone has been held accountable for these abuses.

As the OTP pointed out, the scope of the Department of Justice’s preliminary review (August 2009 to June 2011) of allegations of CIA abuse of detainees, “appears to have been limited to investigating whether any unauthorised interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators, and if so, whether such conduct could constitute violations of any applicable criminal statutes.” (emphasis added) In other words, there has been no criminal investigation into the use of authorised torture techniques, a point highlighted by the OTP which quoted the US Attorney General:

“…the Department of Justice (DOJ) will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

So far, there has been no official comment from Washington on Bensouda’s announcement of her request to seek authorisation to investigate. (For more detail about the poor record of the US military and CIA on dealing with crimes committed by its members, see these two AAN dispatches here and here.

Looking ahead

The Rome Statue does give some ways for either the US or Afghan government to stop an ICC investigation: prosecutions in national courts (Afghan and/or American); showing that the intervention of the ICC would not be in the interest of justice (Kabul has already argued and failed to convince the OTP on this); or an order from the United Nations Security Council to halt the investigation. Nevertheless, Alex Whiting, former prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and ICC, writing on the Just Security website thinks the investigation “undoubtedly will” get authorised by the Pre-Trial Chamber and go ahead. He warns, however, that it will be “difficult, if not nearly impossible” to enact:

The ICC has extremely limited investigative powers and is almost entirely dependent on cooperation by states to gather information. In this case, there will be no cooperation from the Afghan government, the Taliban, or the U.S. As a non-State Party, the U.S. is not obligated to cooperate with the ICC, and the American Service-members’ Protection Act largely prohibits the U.S. from voluntarily cooperating. While some alleged victims will be available to be interviewed in other locations, and some evidence of the alleged crimes in Afghanistan and the black sites has been developed and made available by other inquiries, there is no question that it will be extremely difficult for the ICC to develop evidence to prove culpability beyond a reasonable doubt.

Whiting is wrong in saying there will be no cooperation from the Afghan government. It is obliged by the Rome Statute, like all other State Parties, to “cooperate fully with the Court in its investigation and prosecution of crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court” (article 86, Rome Statue). However, he did leave out one very major problem – the ongoing war and the danger that creates for investigators working on the ground and for victims and witnesses.

Afghans and others have suffered terribly from war crimes and crimes against humanity and deserve justice. After the failures of national courts to take their suffering seriously, the launch of an ICC investigation would be immensely significant, putting the most senior, responsible leaders of the Taleban, Afghan security officials and US forces and officials under scrutiny. It would show that even the most powerful people in a country and the most powerful country in the world are not above the law. Yet, any ICC investigation will be difficult and lengthy. If an investigation is authorised, it will be the start of a new chapter for victims to find justice, not the end.

Edited by Sari Kouvo

 

(1) According to articles 15 and 53 of the Rome Statute, these legal criteria are: 1) at least one of the crimes, which comes under the subject-matter of the ICC, has been committed in the state territory and met the threshold of the ICC in relation to the gravity, 2) the alleged crime has not been proceeded nationally by the state, and 3) there has not be information to believe that the intervention of the ICC will jeopardise “the interests of justice.”

(2) According to article 98 (2) of the Rome Statute, “The Court [ICC] may not proceed with a request for surrender which would require the requested State to act inconsistently with its obligations under international agreements pursuant to which the consent of a sending State is required to surrender a person of that State to the Court, unless the Court can first obtain the cooperation of the sending State for the giving consent for the surrender.”

 

 

 

As an art exhibition featuring the works of eight current and former Guantanamo detainees, Yemeni, Algerian, Pakistani and Kuwaiti, is now showing in New York, we thought we would look at the paintings and sculptures of an Afghan who is still in the prison camp, who is not featured in the exhibition. Assad (known in Guantanamo as Harun Gul) was captured in Afghanistan in 2007 and accused of being a Hezb-e Islami commander and courier for al-Qaeda. An earlier investigation into his case by AAN found the United States had presented no credible evidence to back up its claims. AAN’s Kate Clark has been looking at Assad’s artwork and speaking to his lawyer about the role of art for the detainees.

In 2016, AAN published an exhaustive investigation into the Afghan experience in Guantanamo “Kafka in Cuba” . The section on Assad’s case is re-published here as an appendix.

“He produces more art work than any of our clients,” Assad’s (1) lawyer, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, told AAN. “I’m always impressed. A lot of the pieces come with some sort of meaning. He traces his daughter’s face, for example, again and again.” (2) Assad’s one and only child, a girl, was just an infant when he was detained ten years ago.

Assad is someone I know only indirectly, through documents produced at Guantanamo and by the American justice system. I spent much of 2016 pouring over these papers and those of the other seven Afghans still left in Guantanamo at the start of that year. Just two of the eight are still incarcerated in Cuba, Assad and Muhammad Rahim. They are among the 41 detainees left in the prison camp, remnants of the 730 men ever held there, 220 of whom were Afghan. Assad is one of the 26 men classed as ‘ordinary detainees’ and Rahim one of the 15 ‘High Value’ detainees.

Assad was captured in Afghanistan in 2007 probably by the Afghan intelligence agency, the NDS, (3) and handed over to the US who accused him of being a Hezb-e Islami commander and al-Qaeda courier. Like almost all the other eight Afghans still in Guantanamo in 2016, he has described being tortured (there is confirmatory evidence in two of the cases, although not Assad’s). Like all the others, the US has yet to put forward compelling evidence to support any of its claims against him.

AAN’s investigation into these eight cases found the US based its accusations on hearsay, ‘confessions’ and accusations secured through torture. We found files rife with gross mistakes and misunderstandings and some accusations which were simply fantastical. As can be seen in the appendix to this dispatch, all the allegations against Assad were sourced to his own testimony or that of other detainees which, given the use of torture, makes them unsafe. Even if the US allegations against him are true, the documents available indicate he was only a very junior Hezb commander; at his level, Afghan couriers working with al-Qaeda have been many. The rationale for holding him in Guantanamo has never been apparent.

Out of all of the eight Afghan detainees, the publicly available documents about Assad give the least information about him. Unlike some of his compatriots, Assad’s ‘voice’ is barely heard through the written word. Looking through his paintings, however, a little more of the man comes through.

Flowers painted in Guantanamo

Assad’s artwork

Assad paints seascapes and mountainscapes, rivers and flowers and, on what look like paperweights fashioned out of clay, geometric shapes and, again, flowers. Apart from his daughter, there are few figures. The recurring images of the sea are curious for a man born in a landlocked country (he is from Nangrahar province), but the ocean appears in many detainees’ paintings. One of his former fellow inmates in Guantanamo, Mansoor al-Dayfi, a Yemeni who was released to Serbia last year and is one of the artists with work in the current exhibition, “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo”, in New York, (4) gives some more context. He has described how the sea was a constant presence at the camp, but only its sound. Barriers blocked the prisoners’ view of the ocean. For the Afghans who arrived at the prison camp who had never seen the sea, it was simply unimaginable, said al-Dayfi in an essay for the exhibition’s catalogue:

All that the Afghans knew was that it was a lot of water that kills and eats people. They started asking about the sea. People who knew what the sea was, mostly people like me, from Arab countries, tried to explain it to the Afghans, but that made them even more afraid.

An Afghan pointed to a cargo plane, and said, “The sea is big like this?”

Bigger, he was told. “Ships can carry many planes that size,” another detainee said.

The Afghans told other detainees that the American interrogators threatened them, saying, “When we finish with you here, you will be taken to the sea, and you all will be thrown there.” It wasn’t a good beginning with the sea. (5)

Assad’s lawyer, Shelby Sullivan-Bennis, who works for the legal rights organisation, Reprieve, said she has not asked him why he paints the sea so often or how he came to know about it. However, al-Dayfi said that, for four days in 2014, a hurricane enabled some of the detainees to finally see the ocean. Guards pulled down the green tarpaulins that blocked their view, ahead of the storm.

We all faced one direction: toward the sea. It felt like a little freedom, to look at it. I heard an Afghan guy shout, “Allahu akbar!” at the sight, thanking God for the wonder of the sea, repeating that many times, calling out to his friends.

The tarps remained down for a few days, and the detainees started making art about the sea. Some wrote poems about it. And everyone who could draw drew the sea. I could see different meanings in each drawing, color and shape. I could see the detainees put their dreams, feelings, hopes and lives in them. I could see some of these drawings were mixtures of hope and pain. That the sea means freedom no one can control or own, freedom for everyone

 Each of us found a way to escape to the sea.

Those who could see the sea spent most of their time watching, listening and looking at that big blue color, which cools our souls. The sea was a little rough, because of the windy weather. Huge waves that rose high and hit the land. Looking at a sea like that was scary, but it was what we got, and it felt good. Afghans started calling out to one another and expressing their feelings about what they saw, and turned to us with many questions about that beast.

Those days without the tarps were like a vacation. On the last day the sea looked refreshed, calm and lovely. A huge ship sailed close by. Detainees called out to one another to look at the ship. We kept looking at it like something magic would happen and all of us would be freed. But the ship just disappeared. The next day the workers returned and blocked our sight.

Sullivan-Bennis said her clients vary in their attitude to their artwork. In Assad’s case, he does not take his art too seriously.

He openly mocks his ability to paint and depict anything recognizable, but he continues to incorporate his daughter’s name into almost every piece. He has drawn more copies than I can count of a photo that he has of his daughter; in its final iterations, his sketch is the spitting image of the photo. He also uses art as a way to gift me something, as he often says that he feels he has nothing with which he can thank me… He uses art to show love.

“He openly mocks his ability to paint and depict anything recognisable,” said Assad’s lawyer, but also “uses art to show love.” He repeatedly paints and draws his daughter.

Art classes in Guantanamo

There has always been some art produced by inmates in Guantanamo, even if it was just etching flowers on styrofoam cups. One of the other lawyers with clients there, Aliya Hana Hussain, from the Centre for Constitutional Rights said they heard about this from the very early Bush years, and that “the guards confiscated those [cups] and took them to be analyzed by intelligence to see if they had coded messages.” Sullivan-Bennis, who represents eight inmates at Guantanamo apart from Assad, also said they were told by the “secure facility people that the prisoners might put squiggles into their art as messages to al-Qaeda.” The lawyers assume that this early work was destroyed.

It was much later, after President Barack Obama came to power in 2009, that inmates began to have access to art classes. These, in the words of the US military, were aimed at “providing intellectual stimulation for the detainees and allow[ing] them to express their creativity.”

Even later, Sullivan-Bennis said artwork began to be actively encouraged by detainees’ ‘Personal Representatives’, the military officers who represent them at the Periodic Review Board. This body, set up by Obama, assesses each detainee to determine if they pose a threat to the US. It can chose to send a detainee to military trial, to keep them detained without trial or recommend their transfer out of the camp (meaning release to a third country, with conditions ensuring they will not be tortured or disappear). The Board first met on 11 November 2013. The Personal Representatives, said Sullivan-Bennis, wanted to demonstrate that ‘their’ detainees were participating in courses offered and “had developed skills.” It was a way of trying to convince the Board that they were suitable for transfer out of the camp. She was able to take some artwork – after it was censored – off the island from 2015. As with all things in Guantanamo, said Sullivan-Bennis, “the rules around art-making change frequently and seemingly arbitrarily: the number of canvases that they’re allowed to work on at any given time, the number of pieces they’ve made that they’re allowed to keep in their cell.”

There are other classes apart from art offered and these have varied over time, both as to subject and who is eligible to attend. Currently, one instructor, not an art teacher, is teaching everything in a class called ‘life skills’. These include computer skills and something Sullivan-Bennis found very distressing – teaching ‘forever prisoners’, ie those slated for continuing detention without trial, to write resumes. One man, Sullivan-Bennis said, who had been detained soon after 2001 when he was very young, had only had a single job before being incarcerated. On his resume, she found he had listed the ‘jobs’ he had done in detention.

Unlike many of her clients, Sullivan-Bennis said Assad does not depict suffering. Others paint pictures showing torture, or other forms of misery – one client, for example, painted an older man with a very long beard in a very dark room without dimensions, looking high up to a slit in the wall from which light was coming. The lawyers can see such paintings, but they are not allowed to take them away from Guantanamo. What we can see of the Guantanamo artwork, then, is a skewed, censored selection, tending to show the positive.

Taking artwork off-site may also be forbidden for reasons that are inexplicable. Assad, for example, wanted to send a gift to Sullivan-Bennis’ mother (who is an artist). Told that she lives next to the sea and any depiction of the sea would please her, he managed to find some sea shells, said Sullivan-Bennis and attach them to a fairly large piece of wood, about 8 by 11 inches (20 by 13 centimetres). He shaved the wood, indented it and painted her mother’s name on it. “They didn’t let it out. We don’t know why. It was an enormous personal frustration of mine.”

One other thing to note: art classes are only offered to ordinary inmates at Guantanamo, not the ‘high-value detainees’. The latter category includes the only other Afghan in Guantanamo still, Muhammad Rahim. His outlook is even worse than Assad’s. He was the last person who was subjected to the CIA’s torture and rendition programme and also the last Afghan to have been brought to Cuba. He is the only Afghan who is classed as a ‘High Value Detainee’. That means his case is ultra-secret, with the substance and much of the detail of the allegations against him classified. His lawyer, Carlos Warner, has said he is not even allowed to say why he believes his client is innocent – although the government is free to say what it likes about him. High Value Detainees do not have access to art classes. Some make ‘found art’, said Sullivan-Bennis, using as material whatever they can find – like the styrofoam cups, for example. Where we see glimpses of Rahim is not in artwork, but letters to Warner which have been published: these appear to show him as a witty, wryly political man. (6)

Flowers in prison

A forever prisoner

Assad should probably have been released by now. He only got a lawyer late in the day, nine years into his detention, which meant he did not have time to prepare a strong case for his Periodic Review Board. He was assessed, for the first time, in the last months of the Obama administration, on 16 June 2016. The Board said he should stay in detention, but also indicated that, if he argued his case better, it might find that he no longer posed a threat to the United States. In the last months, days and hours of the Obama administration, there was a push to release as many detainees who had been recommended for transfer as possible before he left office: the last Afghan to leave Cuba, Wali Muhammed, did so just hours before Donald Trump became president. However, even though Assad now has a lawyer and can make a strong case, said Sullivan-Bennis, it looks extremely unlikely that the Board will recommend him transfer: “The Periodic Review Board, brutally flawed as it is, did operate with a modicum of honesty [under Obama]. It operated at least with a view to clearing some of the men. Now, what’s happening is essentially a farce, carrying on the process without there being a process.”

Assad paints flowers and geometric patterns on what look like clay paperweights.

As to other routes out of Guantanamo, as AAN has shown in great detail, the US courts have kow-towed to the executive, presuming that all state evidence is correct. In various detainees’ habeas corpus hearings (when the state has to justify a person’s detention in court or release him or her), judges have accepted evidence that is incoherent, factually mistaken, contradictory and sometimes fantastical (for examples, see the AAN paper, “Kafka in Cuba” . This has meant that recourse to the courts is not a promising course of action for Assad either. “He finally got an attorney after ten years,” said Sullivan-Bennis, “and started all of his cases, only to realise that the routes to freedom are all blocked.”

The most hopeful aspect of Assad’s case is that he is accused of being a member of Hezb-e Islami and that he was a courier between it and al-Qaeda. Hezb-e Islami is now at peace with the Afghan government. That peace deal (read about it here and here) means that, if Assad ever did pose a threat to the US or its allies, that threat should now be considered as vastly diminished. Yet, without a mechanism, either the Periodic Review Board or the courts that hears and genuinely assesses cases, even the peace deal may not help him.

Still human

Providing art classes to those denied their most basic human rights may seem a strange act. Given the dim prospects for release of the 41 men now left in Guantanamo, at least while President Trump is in office, such largesse may be the best they can hope for from the prison authorities. (Their job is to conduct “safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees” and “intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination for the protection of detainees and personnel working in [the] Guantanamo facilities and in support of the War on Terror.”) Giving inmates the opportunity to paint, draw and sculpt could be a kindness, part of what the authorities see as their ‘duty of care’, or a means of reducing the potentially dangerous pressures of boredom and despair. Sullivan-Bennis says she is not sure about the authorities’ motivation, but for her clients, “… the common purpose – that is also the preeminent purpose – is because they want people to know that they are human, still in Guantanamo, and still suffering.” It is very useful to some of them, she said, as an outlet, a way to express themselves. “They show you who they are in their art.”

A mountainscape.

 

(1) In AAN’s earlier report, we used the name Harun Gul: the US either uses this or ‘Harun al-Afghani’ or ‘Harun, the Afghan’ in Arabic. The Arabic takhalus, ‘al-Afghani’, implies he belongs to al-Qaeda because an Afghan would not refer to themselves as Afghan unless to foreigners or use a word that refers to the currency in Dari and Pashto. Assad is what he himself and his family and friends call him.

(2) Quotes from Sullivan-Bennis are either from an interview with AAN or an interview she gave to the curator of the exhibition, excerpts of which appear in the exhibition catalogue.

(3) Amrullah Saleh, who was then director of the NDS told AAN the agency had not handed Assad over to the Americans. The US record says the agency did.

(4) The exhibition “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” is on until 26 January 2018 at the President’s Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, Monday-Friday 1-4pm or by appointment: contact curator@artfromguantanamo[dot]com. Featured are the artworks of eight detainees, five from Yemen, and one each from Algeria, Pakistan and Kuwait. More details can be found here.

(5) The author had a similar experience after the 9/11 attacks, trying to explain the ‘Twin Towers’ to people who had only seen, at most eight-storey buildings (television was then banned in Afghanistan).

(6) This is what we wrote about the letters in “Kafka in Cuba” (full sourcing in original).

Having seen the way habeas petitions have been dealt with by judges, [Rahim’s lawyer] Warner came to the conclusion that they were pointless: they currently provide, he has said, no “meaningful judicial review.” In a context where the Bush administration’s description of those at Guantánamo as ‘the worst of the worst’ has stuck, Warner decided to “adapt his strategy” and publish some of Rahim’s letters. It was an attempt to humanise his client for the American public.

Rahim’s letters

Bearing in mind that the sentiments expressed in these letters have also not been subject to the rigour of a courtroom, they appear to show a man with a quirky sense of humour who sounds human, despite his torture and long, indefinite incarceration in the maximum security facility at Guantánamo (Camp 7). He jokes about the local wildlife and discusses pop culture and American TV stations, for example, expressing his support for the transgender reality TV star, Caitlyn Jenner: “I am happy for her because people are born how they are.” He calls John McCain a “war hero,” Donald Trump an idiot and a “war zero” and thinks Hilary (Clinton) “has a chance.” Rahim talks about having registered with the online dating site, Match.com, and comments on the online infidelity promotion site, Ashley Maddison, being hacked into. In the letters, he also reflects on his time in detention:

In 9 months the CIA treated me like an animal – only animals were treated better, they did not let me shower or use the toilet for months, they fed me animal food. They would not let me pray unless I confessed to untruths – and I was praying for my life. Doctors and psychiatrists got rich off my blood. Are they still harming people? I have dignity. Those who humiliated and hurt me do not. I pray for them now.

Rahim says he wants his day in court:

I am innocent. I was hung from the ceiling until I was dead… How can we undo this injustice? Give me a trial. Let me be free. I am not your enemy and never have been.

Flowers

 

Appendix

In November 2016, AAN published a major investigation into the experiences of Afghans in Guantanamo. This is what we published about Assad. It uses the name the American military has used for him, Harun Gul. ISN refers to his Internment Serial Number. Assad has now been detained for ten years. Full sourcing can be found in the original paper, “Kafka in Cuba”.

Harun Gul (ISN 3148), Nine Years in Detention

• Place of Birth: Sherzad, Nangarhar Province
• Date of Birth: 1981
• Detained: US says NDS detained Harun, 4 February 2007 and handed him over (denied by then director of NDS); transferred to Guantánamo, 22 June 2007
• 2010 Task Force decided to refer him for prosecution (no legal movement on case since). Periodic Review Board ordered his indefinite detention, 14 July 2016
• Guantánamo Documents: Guantanamo Joint Task Force Assessment only

Summary

Harun was detained in Nangarhar in 2007 and accused of being a senior commander with Hezb-e Islami, of associating with “high level militants,” and as having “admitted to acting as a courier for al Qaeda Senior Leadership.” Among the eight cases studied in this report, information about Harun is the scarcest, but from his WikiLeaked Assessment, it can be seen that all the allegations against him are sourced to his own testimony or that of other detainees. In his habeas petition, Harun has alleged he was tortured in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. The methods he described are consistent with those used by US forces at this time. The information available suggests that, even if the allegations against Harun are true, he would have been only a very junior commander and, at his level, Afghan couriers working with al Qaeda are many. The rationale for holding him in Guantánamo is not apparent. The Periodic Review Board decided in August 2016 to keep him in detention.

Capture

Harun’s Assessment says he was detained by the Afghan intelligence agency, NDS, in the Hadda Farms area, Chaparhar District, Nangarhar Province, on 4 February 2007, along with six other men also allegedly suspected of being Hezb-e Islami, none of whom (judging by the absence of ISN numbers) were held at either Bagram or Guantánamo. The then director of the NDS, Amrullah Saleh, told AAN that his agency did not hand over Harun or any other Afghan national to the US authorities. Harun was transferred to Guantánamo on 22 June 2007.

Torture

Harun has alleged that he was tortured in Afghanistan and Cuba:

During his captivity in a military facility in Afghanistan, Mr. Gul’s captors blindfolded, shackled, and hung him by the arms while they were still cuffed behind his back, stripped and tortured him. He was kept alone and naked in a cell without even a bucket as a toilet… During interrogations [in Guantánamo] prison authorities shackled Mr. Gul for up to twelve hours without water or food in a position that allowed him to neither fully stand nor sit, preventing any sleep. That sleep deprivation torture still plagues his nights nine years later.

The allegations are consistent with methods known to have been practiced.

Allegations and evidence

Harun’s capture was announced in a US Department of Defence press release as the detention of a “senior commander of Hezb-e-Islami/Gulbuddin”:

Harun al-Afghani, who was captured as a result of our ongoing efforts in the Global War on Terror, is known to be associated with high-level militants in Afghanistan, and has admitted to serving as a courier for al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL). [He] commanded multiple HIG terrorist cells that conducted improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Nangarhar Province. He is assessed to have had regular contact with senior AQ and HIG leadership.

Documents supplied to his Periodic Review Board hearing, held on 16 June 2016, give a little more detail to the allegations: he had worked, the US military said, as a courier for Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (ISN 10026) until 2004 or 2005 and “provided logistics support to fighters aligned with al-Qa’ida and HIG, and probably collaborated on operational matters with leaders of other anti-Coalition groups.” Harun’s Assessment has strings of allegations sourced almost entirely to Harun himself or other detainees. However, until we have heard his side of the story, it is impossible to judge how plausible they might be.

One indication that the US may have played up its captive comes in the only other publicly available document about Harun, a 90-page ‘terrorist interrogation report’ (TIR) which was presented as part of the government’s rebuttal of a habeas petition by another Afghan detainee, Muhammed Rahim (case 8). After 2001, it said, Rahim was in charge of six armed groups in Nangarhar province, each with just three to five men, and a total operational budget for each one for three months of just 20,000 to 40,000 Pakistani rupees (roughly 200-400 US dollars). This is the description not of a senior commander, but someone at the lowest level of command in Afghanistan. The TIR also says Harun was a senior student leader before the 9/11 attacks, who, just before his detention, had been allegedly tasked with overseeing the creation of a militant Hezb-e Islami student organisation. It also alleged he had a couriering role, passing on letters from the provincial Hezbi commander to Arab members of al Qaeda – actually low-level work.

One is left wondering why Harun was taken to Cuba and why he is still there. Detaining such junior players can be of practical importance for disrupting operations or getting intelligence. However, the US authorities have not only still to back up their case that the allegations against Harun are true, but also, if they are true, that he is so dangerous he needs to be held in indefinite military detention without trial.

US plans for Harun

The 2010 Task Force recommended that Harun be considered for trial. The charges were not specified and there has been no known movement on this. Harun had a Periodic Review Board hearing on 16 June 2016. The board decided to keep him in custody, citing his “lack of credibility and truthfulness, as well as his evasiveness and vague answers.” However, it also encouraged him to “continue to work with his family and representatives on his future plans and to be forthcoming with the Board in future reviews,” a hint possibly that at a future hearing, the Board might decide to transfer him.

 

The Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC), an independent anti-corruption body in Afghanistan, recently released its ‘vulnerability to corruption’ assessment of the Ministry of Education. The assessment points to 36 different types of corruption within the education sector, highlighting that corruption has become endemic in the last 10 to 15 years and that malpractice is systemic within the ministry. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica summarises the report’s findings and recommendations and concludes that this is the first eye-opening report on corruption produced by an Afghan institution.

Education in Afghanistan has frequently been touted as one of the more successful development assistance interventions in the country in the last 15 years. This narrative may have reached a cathartic turn, now. A 170-page vulnerability to corruption assessment of the Afghan Ministry of Education (MoE) (full report available here), released on Thursday 26 October in Kabul by the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC)(1), identified systematic practices of corruption within the ministry that “ranged from school-level issues, such as bribes to modify school certificates, through to ministry-level issues such as corruption in school construction and in textbook distribution.” Put simply, this rather grim read indicates that the entire education sector is either corrupt or vulnerable to corruption. In particular, the report highlights the issue of the “country-wide appointment of teachers on the basis of influence, or nepotism and bribery,” which, according to the MEC, emerged as the most serious issue.

The study was undertaken at the request of then acting-education minister Asadullah Hanif Balkhi in July 2016 (Balkhi lost a vote of confidence in parliament in November 2016, although continued in his post at the request of the president, see AAN’s analysis here.) This is the second time that Balkhi has shaken the ministry to its core. The first time was when, in December 2016, he publicly disputed the number of school-age pupils in Afghanistan given by his predecessor (at over 11 million), stating that the real number was significantly lower (Balkhi contended the figure was closer to just over six million – see this AAN analysis).

The MEC assessment is also the first comprehensive evaluation of corruption within the Ministry of Education. It was carried out in Kabul and nine other provinces (Badakhshan, Balkh, Faryab, Ghazni, Herat, Khost, Bamyan, Panjshir and Nangrahar) and included an assessment of 138 schools. (2) The assessment highlights 36 different types of corruption within the ministry and provides over sixty recommendations. The MEC, in its press release, made a blasting statement: “Taken together, [the 36 types of corruption] constitute a corruption of the very ideal of education in Afghanistan,”

The MEC’s main findings

1. The Education sector as a corrupt job market

According to the MEC report, the education ministry is the single largest employer in the civil sector. In 2015, the civil service (which was supposed to be reformed, see this 2016 AREU study: was estimated to employ over 400,000 people. The MoE, with its 262,000 staff (of whom 216,000 are teachers, according to the MoE’s Human Resources Department), constituted 68 per cent of its total and is a job market susceptible to corruption.

MEC interviews conducted across the sector confirmed that “Corruption related to the appointment of teachers was the principal issue reported by over 90 per cent of the interviewees.” It further notes (page 24):

This result was replicated across all six tiers of interviewees [see endnote 2], all schools and all provinces. The comments all referred to nepotism, favoritism and preference by MoE staff and preference by influential persons, including Members of Parliament (MPs) […] The MEC interviews found that the pressure for MoE to subvert its procedures to employ relatives, friends and favored individuals is relentless and ubiquitous, reported by literally hundreds of interviewees. The most frequent pressure comes from MPs. Interviewees reported MPs intervening at all levels of hiring and promotion, and in the placing of teachers in desirable locations. (pages 24 and 25)

Additionally, the MEC found that payments-for-appointment were widespread throughout the sector:

A widespread practice of payment-for-appointment has now become entrenched, requiring an average of between [Afghani] 50,000 to 70,000 (about USD 800 to 1,000) from the applicant. The amount varies depending on the attractiveness of the position. This has also meant that some teachers have been forced to seek additional work outside of school to feed themselves and their families because they have had to pay the equivalent of one or two year’s salary to secure a teaching position. (pages 25-6)

In Afghanistan, stable, full-time employment is hard to come by. According to official Afghan government statistics, of the 7.2 million Afghans who have a job, only 19 per cent have job security, leaving 81 per cent to worry about the permanence of their positions. Statistics indicate that over 26 per cent of young people qualified to work are unemployed. According to the MEC’s findings, the high number of teacher unemployment (some 75 per cent of Teacher Training College graduates are unable to find work) is likely due, in large part, to this corruption. There are widespread related problems, such as a corrupt system of examinations, payment being required to obtain a teaching position, corrupt recruitment procedures, teachers paying to stay on beyond retirement age, gender bias and teachers demanding bribes. (Verbal and physical abuse of children is also listed as another major problem.) In conclusion, the MEC noted that corruption in teachers’ appointments is the single most dangerous practice threatening students’ education, as parents and communities at large have lost confidence in the system (before the war, teaching was a highly respected profession).

The MEC also found that corrupt recruitment practices often, if not always, entail nepotism and favouritism, or, as the report stated: “applicants who are not from among a particular affiliation – family, tribal, political – will generally be unsuccessful in gaining an actual appointment.” In addition, a lack of reliable records coupled with non-transparent recruitment processes and an absence of performance management, renders the system particularly vulnerable to corrupt practices.

2. 2. Textbooks as subversion of development assistance

The ministry has been wholly reliant on donor support to print and deliver textbooks to schools across Afghanistan since 2002. For example, USAID has provided support for printing and distributing over 130 million primary and secondary grade textbooks in Afghanistan since then. Between 2003 and 2015, Denmark contributed to the financing of a total of 144.8 million textbooks benefitting a minimum of eight million students (see this 2017 DANIDA – Denmark’s Development Cooperation evaluation report of the education sector). DANIDA also financed storage for textbooks: in total, 38 warehouses and 17 containers were financed to prevent textbook damage (each warehouse accommodating between 800,000 to 1,2 million textbooks). Until 2010, however, the main issue was with the procurement of printing services:

For example, a single Afghan publishing company won five out of six textbook procurement tenders between 2004 and 2010, despite not meeting the contractual obligations to print the books in-country. The DPs [development partners] most involved in textbook procurement – USAID and DANIDA – have implemented measures to improve procurement procedures and minimize corrupt practices at the highest level, though further problems have emerged down the supply line. (page 63)

These “further problems” included books initially delivered to Kabul not being distributed to provincial and district warehouses or on to schools. And, yet, since the books are financed by the development assistance funds, they are meant to be distributed free of charge. MEC researchers observed that:

A stark reality which consistently confronted the MVCA researchers in the field, has been the absence of textbooks in classrooms. It was common to observe very few textbooks at all, and those present were often of poor quality, old and shabby, or poorly produced photocopies of long-lost originals. Therefore many of these textbooks are not aligned to reflect the curriculum modifications and frequently for many subjects, a single book was observed being shared among three students. […] Usually the books that students receive from school are old black and white versions whereas new books, of good quality, and full-color, are available in the local bazaar. In some schools, or in places where students have a close relationship with teachers or the school principal, they get a complete set of books – while other students in the same classes and schools have to buy their books. In the cities, all the books are usually available in the market, but in the villages and rural areas, some books are not available, so the students ask the school administration to provide the books for them, reportedly to no avail. (pages 62 and 63)

As parts of the curriculum have undergone several revisions, each revision has required new textbooks to be printed. This has enabled further, extensive corruption, especially in the distribution of textbooks since 2010, as new prints have been required more often. Students all across the country, MEC found, have to buy their own textbooks, which are meant to be free.

3. Unmanageable ministry

The Ministry of Education is so large and so bogged down in corruption that it is almost unmanageable in the Afghan context, the MEC concluded.

Being a highly centralized system, the source of most of the problems – and the solutions – is to be found at the heart of the system, with the Ministry and the officials in Kabul. The problems of extensive nepotism, weak controls, inefficient and corruption-prone procedures and policies are all well-known and are long-standing, dating back at least 15 years. (page 73)

The MEC further reported that the MoE’s Payroll Department was unable to provide an accurate figure of the number of people it had paid in the last three months. (page 24) Furthermore, salaries continue to be paid in cash in most provinces, which increases the risk of corruption. (There has been a similar problem with the police and armed forces, although it is being tackled – see AAN’s previous analysis on the reform of the Ministry of Interior).

Procurement procedures also continue to be susceptible to corruption. This causes delays for most projects, with some left incomplete for years. The MEC noted that improved external verification of school construction, including by donors, was required.

There are no checks or balances in the MoE, the anti-corruption committee found. One recommendation highlighted the need for “routine, independent inspection of the quality of education in the schools. At present school quality inspection is ineffective and not independent.”

4. A lack of reliable records

As AAN reported earlier in 2017, there are no reliable records and many inconsistencies in Afghan education statistics (with the number of students nationwide counted as anything between six to ten million). This discrepancy in itself may indicate widespread corruption throughout the sector, as it allows for the manipulation of development assistance and practices based on inaccurate numbers and baselines. The data collected by the MEC for the 138 schools it visited showed that official numbers were 23 per cent higher than the number of students actually attending. (The MEC only obtained official data for 88 schools of the 138 it visited). The committee carefully concluded that:

This data sample is too small for any generalizable conclusions. However, given that MEC did not analyses the most insecure provinces, where the attendance is likely to be still lower than enrolment, this finding therefore needs urgent attention by those reviewing EMIS [Education Management Information System] data quality.

The MEC further indicated that the quality of the data gathered by EMIS at both the district and provincial levels was questionable and that a lack of reliable data impedes planning. The anti-corruption committee warned that “owing to unreliable data processing, the central database cannot be populated accurately,” and that “the absence of accurate data has facilitated the generation of ‘ghost schools,’ ‘ghost pupils’ and ‘ghost teachers’” – as reported by AAN in this 2013 analysis.

5. Corrupt adult literacy programmes

The anti-corruption committee further found that adult literacy programmes were substantially corrupted:

Feedback from interviewees was widespread that these programs were often non-existent in the Provinces. Officers in the Deputy Ministry for Literacy themselves acknowledged many challenges and vulnerabilities in the implementation of the programs and poor coordination between MoE and MoLSAMD [Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled]. Weak oversight led to problems in multiple locations, including improper implementation, collusion to hide the absence of any implementation, inappropriate and fraudulent participants, and numerous ‘ghost’ program sites. (page 60)

Additionally, the Technical Vocational Education & Training (TVET) run by the MoE had an outdated curriculum that was unrelated to the employment market. The MEC’s researchers found that some teachers in this field were also corrupt and that many teachers in the MoE-run programmes were incompetent. The report noted that TVET programmes run by non-governmental organisations, both local and international, were of a much higher quality than the MoE programmes.

6. Other issues

The MEC’s detailed report highlights a number of other issues that hamper the reliability of the education sector. To list a few, the professional capacity of officers at the MoE to conduct performance management is generally regarded as low; the proportion of committed teachers is reported to be declining; and the frequent alterations to the curriculum enable further corruption. According to the MEC, this means that the curriculum “is beyond the competence of many teachers,” and because of this, “they have to resort to dishonest methods to help the students get through the exams.”

This inevitably leads to a low level of education and a general loss of trust among communities in their education providers.

MEC recommendations

The MEC’s recommendations (of which there are 66) are structured in ten categories, which, among other things, call for local responsibility, institutional reforms, legal reforms, increased transparency and better enforcement. At the local level, the MEC calls on school communities to bear the primary responsibility for selecting their teachers, instead of the corrupt MoE’s provincial departments. Institutional reform, according to the MEC, should entail a reduction of the size and scope of the MoE, in order to make it more manageable and less vulnerable to corruption. This would include reforming the mechanism for selecting teachers and a revision of the size of the curriculum. A successful change of the MoE, according to MEC’s recommendation would be a two-fold approach, which requires, at the local level, community-led appointments of teachers and, at the central-level, to establish a full-time task force with strong cabinet backing as well as a clear metric by which to measure success in cleaning up teachers’ appointments. The anti-corruption committee also suggests that the Technical Vocational Education & Training be an autonomous entity outside of the MoE.

In terms of legal changes, the MEC recommended that the “MoE leadership make and implement a new policy of actively challenging and reacting to corruption.” A positive step for immediate change would include the establishment of an independent complaints body tasked with investigating corruption within the MoE, as well as increased visibility and local accountability regarding teachers’ appointments. Regarding the international community, the MEC recommended that donors quickly signal their support for a new focus on anti-corruption and on independent oversight as the basis for raising the quality of education. The MEC also recommended improvements to Education Management Information System (EMIS) and the human resources systems, independent oversight, increased transparency, greater enforcement (which would mean that the Attorney General’s Office actively take up the backlog of MoE corruption cases), and market-based alternatives, such as vouchers, for the purchase of textbooks by students and parents).

Sound recommendations, but to what end?

The MEC’s report stands out as the clearest and most blunt assessment of corruption in Afghanistan’s education sector so far. Previous reports, among them most prominently the reports of the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, have detailed some corrupt practices within the ministry, but none has captured the extent and magnitude of corruption in education as the MEC report has done.

Some of the report’s excellent recommendations rightly call for immediate action. But the report leaves the reader wondering how much can be repaired and how quickly, given the scale and depth of the corruption within the ministry. World Bank corruption experts, for example, have shown (page 11) that such institutional transformation takes decades. Given the role of political patronage in teachers’ appointments and other elements of politicisation in the educational system (see this AREU report: and AAN here), a solution to these problems requires not only political will, but enormous courage. Whether the Afghan government can muster such political courage to prioritise these issues remains uncertain.

The report has one advantage, however: unlike an earlier report by a president-appointed fact-finding mission, the results of which were not allowed to be published (see here), the MEC’s report is publicly available and everyone – students, parents, teachers, parliament members and donors – has the chance to read what is wrong in the Afghan education system, as well as how it could, potentially, be put right.

 

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Thomas Ruttig

 

 

(1) The MEC is an independent agency created in 2010 set up following the London Conference commitments. It was established based on Presidential Decree 61/2010, which primarily regulated the establishment of the High Office of Oversight and Anti-corruption, and, in Article 8, the establishment of a Monitoring and Evaluation Committee, “within the framework of this Office, consisting of the national and international experts on the field of fighting corruption.” The Committee, Article 8 stated, is “required to assist governmental organs in determining effective development benchmarks and, with the necessary monitoring and evaluations, provide six-month report to the president, national assembly, international community and the public regarding activities on fighting against corruption at the national level as well as on assistance of the international community and donors.”

On 18 September 2016, the Afghan president issued Presidential Decree No. 115/2016, which changed the legal status, duties, scope of activities and authorities of the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee. A new presidential decree gave the MEC a truly independent status, with its own “limited tashkil (organizational structure and staffing).” It also stipulated in Article 3 that “all the government organizations and international institutions, while offering their full cooperation, are obliged to provide the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee with the statistics and information needed for the evaluation, and implement the recommendations of the Committee and regularly report the state of implementation of these recommendations to the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee.”

The MEC’s central structure – a committee – still includes both national and international experts, notably three national and three international commissioners. While national experts are directly appointed by the president, all international appointments are subject to presidential approval.

(2) The MEC carried out 542 interviews with five groups of people: ministry officials (109), provincial education officials (126); training colleges (76), teachers (93), parents and students (125), development partners and others (22). It also conducted 160 focus group discussions.

Reporting from the United States has said that the CIA is expanding its operations in Afghanistan, running Afghan militias to “hunt and kill” Taleban and “poised” to start flying armed drones. The CIA has run Afghan militias in the past; they were notorious for human rights abuses and for not being subject to the state justice system or Afghan government. Up till now, only the US military has flown drones offensively in Afghanistan. For Washington, the only ‘advantage’ the CIA might bring over the military would be secrecy and lack of accountability, says AAN’s Kate Clark, as she looks at what an expansion of CIA operations might mean for Afghanistan.

The New York Times has given a detailed, well-sourced – and rather gushing – account of the CIA’s planned expansion of its operations in Afghanistan. Deploying dehumanising language with apparent relish, the paper describes the CIA using Afghan militias to ‘hunt’ (the word is used five times in the piece) and kill Taleban. The newspaper reports CIA director Mike Pompeo as saying, “We can’t perform our mission if we’re not aggressive…This is unforgiving, relentless. You pick the word. Every minute, we have to be focused on crushing our enemies.” The paper details two tactics the CIA is keen to pursue:

• Counterterrorism pursuit teams or CTPTs. The CIA is reported to be currently running these teams to “hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country” and “hunt[ing] Taleban bomb makers including using night raids.” The teams, the paper says, “are managed by CIA paramilitary officers from the agency’s Special Activities Division and operatives from the National Directorate of Security [NDS] and include elite American troops from the Joint Special Operations Command and contractors. The majority of the forces, however, are Afghan militiamen.”
• Flying drones in offensive operations inside Afghanistan. Up till now, the CIA has only flown drones from Afghanistan across the border to strike targets in the Pakistani tribal areas. However, according to The New York Times, the CIA has been pushing for authorisation to fly drones inside Afghanistan and is now “poised” to do this.

The CIA’s use of militias

Afghan militias, operating outside an Afghan government chain of command, have been used by international forces, especially US Special Operations Forces (SOF) and the CIA since 2001. It has often been debatable who was running whom. Militias set up by or fighting alongside international forces (often called ‘campaign forces’) have frequently used their alliance to pursue personal or factional goals – including targeting rivals and carrying out crime – as well as often gaining a fierce reputation for fighting Taleban. (For more detail on militias, see here). Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams (CTPTs) were examples of this type of militia. The name was first used publicly by Bob Woodward in his 2010 book “Obama’s Wars”. He described them as:

… the CIA’s 3000-man covert army in Afghanistan. Called CTPT for Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, the army consisted mostly of Afghans, the cream of the crop in the CIA’s opinion. These pursuit teams were a paid, trained and functioning part of the CIA that was authorised by President Bush. The teams conducted operations designed to kill or capture Taleban insurgents, but also often went into [the Pakistani] tribal areas to pacify and win support.

According to Kimberly Dozier, Associated Press’ intelligence correspondent in 2010, “the 3,000-strong Afghan teams are used for surveillance and long-range reconnaissance missions and some have trained at CIA facilities in the United States.” They have also been involved in night raids and detentions. In 2009, Dozier said, they had been the subject of a turf war between US Special Operations Forces and CIA over who would control them; the CIA won. (Other US newspaper reports on the teams can be read here and here.)

The CTPTs tended to follow the pattern of being aggressive enemies of the Taleban and perpetrators of crimes and egregious human rights abuses against civilians and detainees. Their close working relationship with US forces meant they were able to operate with virtual impunity from the Afghan justice system, as can be seen by looking at some of the individual units.

Khost Protection Force

The Khost Protection Force, reportedly still active and still under CIA control, emerged out of a militia which was notionally the 25th Division in the Afghan Military Forces – the latter term was used to describe the various militia and factional forces from the Northern Alliance and those loyal to pro-US Pashtun commanders which came under Ministry of Defence control in 2001/02 and were funded by the US before the creation of the Afghan National Army (ANA). The 25th Division had a high proportion of former members of the PDPA army. It was spared Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) because of its good links to the US military.

Allegations against the Khost Protection Force are long-standing. These include extrajudicial killing, torture and beating of civilians, sometimes in the presence of US advisers (see here and here)and unlawful detentions. In 2014, UNAMA found that five detainees who had been arrested by the Khost Protection Force together with international military forces and detained at the US Camp Chapman base in Khost were subjected to ill-treatment by the force. In December 2015, US newspaper reporting alleged that six civilians had been killed during Khost Protection Force-led raids on homes in the province in the presence of American advisers and that the group was still unlawfully detaining and abusing detainees, UNAMA’s 2016 mid-year report cited particular concerns about the number of civilian casualties caused by the Khost Protection Force and called for its integration into regular ANSF chains of command and accountability.

Afghan Security Guards

This Counterterrorism Pursuit Team operated in Paktika province and was commanded by Commander Azizullah, an ethnic Tajik in an overwhelmingly Pashtun province. An investigation by reporter Jules Cavendish described the Afghan Security Guards as existing to “protect Firebase Lilley, a remote outpost in eastern Paktika province that doubles as a listening post for the CIA and a training hub for some of the agency’s 3,000 private troops (known as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams).” The Afghan Security Guards’ main job though, he said, was “killing Taleban.” 

Cavendish and later Human Rights Watch, both with access to two internal United Nations reports, detailed at least nine well-documented and established incidents perpetrated by the Afghan Security Guards from 2008 to early 2010 including extrajudicial killing of civilians, possible examples of collective punishment or retaliatory killing, summary execution of detainees in custody, detaining young boys and reportedly sexually abusing them and frequent thefts and beatings during night raids. (1) No disciplinary or criminal measures were ever reported as having been taken against Azizullah or the forces under his command. Indeed, in 2011, the Afghan Security Guards was folded into the Afghan Local Police (ALP) and Azizullah was appointed chief of the provincial ALP. This means that his forces are probably largely intact and in situ.

Kandahar Strike Force (KSF) 

The KSF operated out of the old house in Kandahar of former Taleban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, re-named Camp Gecko. Its chain of command appeared to be an informal arrangement, by-passing the ministries of interior and defence, and answering to the US SOF and/or CIA, as well as to Ahmad Wali Karzai, the late brother of former president Karzai. Jules Cavendish, again at the forefront of investigations (see here and here), described how KSF recruits were cherry-picked from regular Afghan army units and trained by US SOF at Camp Gecko:

‘Foreign military advisers at the camp taught hand-to-hand combat and put new recruits through ambush training, as well as teaching them English, said [former leader Atal] Afghanzai. Everyone, he said, from the cook to the Special Forces advisers, was ‘working for OGA somehow’: an acronym standing for ‘other government agencies’ and generally used to refer to the CIA. ‘We had day raids, night raids. Any time we received intel from the NDS [Afghanistan’s security service] that there were 10, 20, 50 insurgents gathering in a house or a garden, we’d launch an op.’ 

The 400-strong group fought well, but according also to The Wall Street Journal and reports on the torture of security detainees by the Open Societies Foundation and Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and UNAMA, it was abusive. Allegations included extrajudicial killings, unlawful detentions and extreme beatings and brutality during night raids and severe beatings amounting to torture at Camp Gecko.

The group’s de facto impunity for alleged crime and abuses partly ended when forty KSF soldiers stormed Kandahar police station in 2009 and killed the provincial police chief, Matiullah Qahteh, apparently in revenge for a murdered KSF fighter. KSF leader, Atal Afghanzai and 38 others were convicted of this murder, a rare example, reported Cavendish, of “the Afghan judiciary coming down on a US bankrolled mercenary – and likely only happened because Afghanzai and his men killed a well-connected Afghan police commander in broad daylight.” There has been little reporting on the KSF since 2013 when public pressure, in particular the detention and abuse of a student, may have forced the group to disband.

The NDS 0-4 Team, Kunar

In 2013, there were two disastrous raids in the Shigal Valley in Kunar which brought to light the existence of the ‘0-4 unit’, a 1200-strong force that was nominally NDS. However, then Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizy told The Guardian the force was actually a CIA proxy: “Some of them are said to be working with the NDS, but they are not armed by the NDS, not paid by the NDS, and not sent to operations by the NDS. Sometimes they only inform the NDS minutes before the operation.” During two raids in Shigal on 7 February and 13 April 2013 when seven or eight CIA paramilitaries accompanied about 75 men from the unit, the CIA called in air strikes which killed nine and 17 civilians, respectively. There were indications that those on the ground knew when they requested the second strike that there were civilians in the house they were targeting, but called it in anyway (potentially in breach of the Laws of War); it followed the killing of a CIA agent by insurgents. (Read AAN analysis here).

In the wake of the strikes in Kunar, the National Security Council ordered the disbandment of all militias run by international forces. President Karzai had already banned such groups in February 2013. (2)

Militias currently operating

Earlier this year, AAN and GPPi wrote that, out of the various CTP teams, only the Khost Protection Force appeared still to be active – and to be still under CIA command and linked to Camp Chapman. The Afghan Security Guards in Paktika had been rolled into the ALP programme and the Kandahar Strike Force appeared to have been disbanded. Yet, the recent piece by The New York Times refers to the CTPTs in the present tense and says that, after the withdrawal of most international forces in 2014, they “continued to conduct missions in Afghan cities and in the surrounding countryside, and with greater autonomy.” Some more detail from the newspaper as to who they are referring to would be useful here. The Times says the units are “managed” by CIA and NDS operatives, but the experience of NDS 0-4 highlights the possibility that Afghan oversight can be in name only. It also said contractors are part of the teams.

Some digging has produced a few other possible examples of CTPTs currently operating. NDS 0-4, we were told, now consisting of 250 men trained by US Special Forces appears still to be active, and working with (for?) the CIA still, with a zone of responsibility extending into southern Nuristan. NDS’s 0-2 brigade in Nangrahar would be another possible unit worth looking into. In a recent incident, a night raid reportedly with international air support in Mohmand Dara district on a house occupied by people displaced by the conflict in Achin, ended with what relatives said were seven dead civilians. Voice of America journalist, Zabihullah Ghazi, named the 0-4 unit as involved, although the 0-2 unit would seem more likely given the location. Relatives and neighbours brought the dead bodies to Mohmand Dara district headquarters in protest and blocked the Jalalabad to Torkham highway on 24 October 2017.

Finally, it seems possible that some of Kandahar Provincial Police Chief Abdul Razeq’s forces in Kandahar are formally designated as CTPTs to allow for operations on the other side of the border. Razeq has been reported to run limited campaigns into Pakistan – mostly for assassinations.

The problems with militia forces

Militia forces have a long and troubled history in Afghanistan. Unless reigned in by tight command and control, they tend to be abusive. Militias that answer to foreign powers and lie outside Afghan state control have had a particularly poor record since 2001. Those giving the orders on the US side have tended to have very short-term, narrow goals. The definition of ‘security’ for local Afghans and the Afghan state, for example, is likely to be much broader than just killing Taleban and would include a desire not to be exposed to abusive militias or see state sovereignty eroded by them. The Karzai administration was mistrustful of such militias because they undermined state power, with some limited exceptions, such as the Kandahar Strike Force, which answered not only to the US SOF and CIA, but to the president’s brother, Ahmad Wali (himself named as a CIA proxy). For the US military or CIA, a militia’s raison d’être would be killing Taleban, while the abuse of civilians might be an unpleasant, but unavoidable side effect. This view was put into words by a Green Beret captain, known as Matt, speaking to Jules Cavendish in 2011 as he tried to justify why they worked with militias whose behaviour “insults Western sensibilities [sic].”

“There are no good guys by our standards. There is no standard to begin with. There is no justice system or rule of law to hold people accountable,” Matt says. “The Taliban are not horribly bad and the Afghan farmer is not an innocent victim.” 

In this moral twilight, refusing to work with paramilitaries accused of rights abuses accomplishes nothing, he argues. Instead, as relationships develop, so do the possibilities for altering the “moral calculus” of the Afghan fighters.   

“I don’t like this reality,” says Matt. “But I do not have the power to make Afghans conduct themselves like Americans in matters of politics and warfare. I can only influence it over time.” The alternative is to “go home now.”

Abuses can also, of course, drive rebellion. This was the conclusion of the leaked UNAMA report about Azizullah’s offenses against the population in Paktika. (3)

CIA drones and secrecy in conflict

The other obvious problem with the CIA running militias or flying drones is the secrecy the agency operates under. Different US legislation governs the CIA and the military. The CIA, as opposed to the military, has extensive license to run secret programmes and the government is legally restricted from providing information about them. Up till now, only the US military has flown drones in Afghanistan. According to The New York Times, the CIA is now about to start doing so. As AAN reported in 2016, this issue is not straightforward:

There have been reports of ‘turf fighting’ between the Pentagon and CIA over who should control the programme, but mainly reports of a high degree of operational cooperation, for example in kill/capture operations in Yemen, Iraq and cross-border strikes from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and of air force pilots flying drones on behalf of the CIA. Last year [2015], a general shift from the CIA to JSOC [the US military Joint Special Operations Forces Command] carrying out drone strikes was reported.

Robert Chesney of the US law and national security website, Lawfare, has said that “in terms of practicalities…the operations themselves may still be hybrid, involving both military and CIA surveillance and intelligence.” Who issues the final order may not be so important, he thinks.

However, there are concerns about the CIA’s lack of accountability and transparency in Afghanistan, at least (for discussion, see here and here and here). For Washington, the only benefit the CIA might have over the military in flying drones would be the extra secrecy. This was important, for example, in the drone strikes carried out in neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas; the CIA was chosen to fly drones from Afghanistan into Pakistan, it seems, because the agency’s secrecy allowed Islamabad to pretend that it was hostile to American attacks on its territory. However, the US is fighting a ‘declared war’ in Afghanistan (in US terms, it is an “area of active hostilities”) which means, for example, that air sorties and munitions dropped are reported.

The US military has certainly become less transparent about its operations in Afghanistan since pre-2014, but it is still far more accountable to Afghan policy makers, MPs and official watchdogs than the CIA, and the media and NGOs can, at least, contact it. Moreover, it is the CIA’s secrecy, whether it comes to authorising drone strikes or running proxy militias, that makes it dangerous.

We do not know whether agency operatives get training in the Laws of Armed Conflict – unlike the military which publishes its training and legal manuals – or whether agents are disciplined for breaching them. We do not know what the CIA tells its proxies they can or cannot do. Unlike the foreign military and Afghan intelligence, police, army and detention centres, as far as we know, the CIA does not open its doors to the official watchdogs, such as UNAMA’s human rights team, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the AIHRC. Nor does it engage in dialogue on issues such as whether it adheres to the Geneva Conventions when it conducts hostilities. An official from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) told AAN, it does not and cannot scrutinise US funding of the NDS because the funding comes from the CIA. The only monitoring of the agency is in the United States and is domestic, through the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

Philip Alston, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, writing in 2011 about the CIA’s use of lethal force when carrying out targeted killings by drone or in ‘kill/capture’ missions, has said the agency is effectively unaccountable:

Assertions by Obama administration officials, as well as by many scholars, that these operations comply with international standards are undermined by the total absence of any forms of credible transparency or verifiable accountability. The CIA’s internal control mechanisms, including its Inspector-General, have had no discernible impact; executive control mechanisms have either not been activated at all or have ignored the issue; congressional oversight has given a ‘free pass’ to the CIA in this area; judicial review has been effectively precluded; and external oversight has been reduced to media coverage which is all too often dependent on information leaked by the CIA itself. As a result, there is no meaningful domestic accountability for a burgeoning program of international killing.

The CIA’s secrecy and lack of accountability makes abuses and breaches of the Laws of War more likely to happen. At the same time, the lack of accountability means the United States, in Alston’s words, “cannot possibly satisfy its obligations under international law to ensure accountability for its use of lethal force, either under [International Human Rights Law] or [International Humanitarian Law – the Laws of War].” Significant also is that, looking at the CIA’s record over many decades of operating in Afghanistan, it has shown itself to be consistently short-termist and ready to accept or even embrace abuse for the ‘greater good’. (4)

The CIA’s role in the context of Washington’s military strategy

The New York Times reported Pompeo saying that President Trump had “authorized the agency to ‘take risks’ in its efforts to combat insurgents ‘as long as they made sense,’ with an overall goal ‘to make the C.I.A. faster and more aggressive.’” The belligerent posturing of the CIA director appears to be part of a wider US narrative, with the tone set by Trump when he announced his Afghan military strategy on 21 August 2017 as “killing terrorists… not nation-building [sic].” General John Nicholson, commander of US and international forces in Afghanistan, has since promised that “a tidal wave of air power is on the horizon” and “this is the beginning of the end for the Taliban.” (5) For all the bold words of the US, though, even Trump does not claim that ‘victory’ involves defeating the Taleban:

“Our troops will fight to win. We will fight to win. From now on, victory will have a clear definition: attacking our enemies, obliterating ISIS, crushing al Qaeda, preventing the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan, and stopping mass terror attacks against America before they emerge.” (emphasis added)

Trump acknowledged that “Military power alone will not bring peace to Afghanistan or stop the terrorist threat arising in that country” and that, “strategically applied force aims to create the conditions for a political process to achieve a lasting peace.” The New York Times also reported in its piece on CIA militias that there is a “tacit acknowledgment that to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table — a key component of Mr. Trump’s strategy for the country — the United States will need to aggressively fight the insurgents.”

Afghanistan has been here before. During the surge (2009-12) when President Obama raised US troop levels to more than 100,000, the US military believed it could solve the country’s insurgency by killing Taleban. A great deal of energy, creativity, thought, money and lives went into that fighting. Efforts to find a negotiated end to the conflict were, by contrast, meagre, despite then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton casting US strategy as “fight, talk, build” (in 2009, she had accepted that some Taleban could be talked to. In 2011, security correspondent for The Wire, Spencer Ackerman reported, “Obama’s generals promised that it would whup the Taliban into suing for peace,” but all the surge did was “rescue Afghanistan from the brink of total failure.”

Since then, the Taleban adapted and, in the lead up to the withdrawal of most international forces, themselves ‘surged’ and have steadily taken territory and threatened population centres since then, taking (and losing) Kunduz city in 2015 and 2016 and almost taking Lashkargah in Helmand, Tirin Kot in Uruzgan and Farah city in 2016. The US in support of the ANSF may be able to push the Taleban back again (see analysis here), but virtually no-one expects a military victory by either side. Despite that, as of yet, there has still been no significant attempt to, as Trump put it, begin a “political process to achieve a lasting peace.” Rather, as the American intervention in Afghanistan enters its seventeenth year, the CIA like the US military is, as reported by The New York Times, preparing to intensify its efforts:

One senior American official acknowledged that the scope of the new directive would require more manpower, and that it would take time to build up the number of officers and teams to carry out those missions in Afghanistan. But the official insisted that the agency was committed to using its new authority to ramp up its strikes in parallel with increased military air and ground operations.

This reader is left with a strong sense of déjà vu, not just with America’s strategy and rhetoric, but with the prospect of the CIA once again trying out the failed tactics of the past.

 

 

(1) The leaked UNAMA southeast region report, as reported by Human Rights Watch, included to particularly horrific accounts of extrajudicial killings, one clearly against civilians and the other appearing to be a form of retaliatory or collective punishment. Nine civilians, including three children (six to ten years old) were reportedly killed in early 2009 in Barmal district. Then, later that year, in September/October 2009, UNAMA documented a retaliatory raid, led by Azizullah, against a village in Barmal where there was a clash between the Afghan Security Guards and insurgents. During the raid, forces shot and killed three men working in nearby farm areas (for no apparent reason) and “then strapped [the] bodies [of the three men] to the hood of vehicles and drove through Margha Mandi bazaar, announcing that they were terrorists. The bodies were kept for eight days until they started to decompose, at which point they were returned to their families.”

(2) Later in 2013, there was a new scandal when it was revealed that 17 detainees had been killed, possibly after torture, between 2012 and 2013 in Nerkh in Wardak province (see reports (here and here). The perpetrators were either militiamen affiliated with or direct auxiliaries of US Special Operations Forces, or members of the SOF themselves (see also AAN analysis). One translator was charged and sentenced. After repeated denials of wrong-doing, on 17 July 2013, the US military said it was launching a criminal investigation after the UN and ICRC had supplied it with fresh evidence. It has yet to release its findings.

(3) Human Rights Watch quoted the 2010 report as saying:

 We see significant indications that the unintended consequences of employing someone like Commander Azizullah may be the growing hostility of large parts of the population due to his behavior towards the local people both on and off duty.

(4) As AAN wrote in 2013:

From its inception, the agency has never been solely, or even mainly, an intelligence gathering body. Rather it has focussed resources and personnel on running covert operations, often of a military nature. In Afghanistan, its record is long and dubious, going back to its funding of the 1980s jihad through the ‘deniable’ conduit of the Pakistani Islamist military dictator General Zia ul-Haq and the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI. By subcontracting its support for the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance, the CIA gave Pakistan a free hand to favour and build up Islamist forces and marginalise non-Islamist forces. Zia was also able to cream off funds: CIA dollars helped pay for the immeasurable strengthening of the ISI, the forced lurch of the army to the jihadist right and a huge Islamist madrassa building programme.

In the CIA’s second bite at the Afghan cherry, after the 9/11 attacks, it was given new orders by President George W Bush in a top secret directive issued on 17 September 2011, in the words of Tim Weiner, ‘to hunt, capture, imprison and interrogate suspects around the world… set[ting] no limits on what the agency could do.’ The CIA would go on to arm proxy forces in Afghanistan. These, incidentally, were always either treated as if they did not exist by the various disarmament programmes of DDR and DIAG, or were units of the old army such as in Khost which were officially disarmed, but kept on as Campaign Forces. The CIA also set up a global detention and rendition programme in which torture and associated abuses were perpetrated, with Afghanistan acting as one of the hubs (for details see this report).  

For more details about the impact of CIA detentions and torture on Afghans and Afghanistan, including how the abuse helped fuel the Taleban insurgency, see here.

(5) Trump has lifted some restrictions on the US military on the ground and in the air, with one result being a sharp rise in air strikes, following earlier steady increases, as targeting conditions were loosened. Civilian casualties have also risen. See details and AAN analysis here.

It is 40 days since the historian, archivist and activist on behalf of Afghans, Nancy Hatch Dupree, died, aged 89. She had spent decades of her life in Afghanistan or, like many Afghans, in exile in neighbouring Pakistan. She was the author of guidebooks on Afghanistan and a publisher of books. Then, first with her husband, Louis, and, after he died in 1989, by herself, Nancy amassed the most extensive archive of documents of the last forty years. Those 100,000 documents are now housed in a special building, known as the Afghanistan Collection at Kabul University (ACKU). Last night, in London, friends and colleagues met to celebrate Nancy’s life and mark her passing. Here, we publish some of the tributes that were made that evening.

Our first despatch to mark Nancy’s ‘fortieth day’, a republishing of an interview she gave in 2007, can be read here. See also AAN’s obituary for her and our report about the opening of the AFKU here.  

Shoaib Sharifi, journalist

My first exposure to the name ‘Nancy Dupree’ goes back 18 years to 1998 when I joined Voice of Sharia, the official name of Radio Afghanistan under the Taliban. At a time when the world thought of Afghanistan as in one of its darkest eras and against all odds, as a newly recruited intern, I was assigned to introduce Afghanistan, its art and culture to the world via Radio Voice of Sharia’s English Programme.

The editor of foreign languages at Voice of Sharia, an educated and dedicated Taleban official, handed me an overly used book and gave me my job description in two sentences: “This is a historical guide to Afghanistan written by a foreigner. It talks about the golden days of Afghanistan. Read this!” Nothing more, nothing less.

Nancy’s legendary guide to Afghanistan: published in 1970 and still the go-to guide.

And with Nancy Dupree’s book An Historical Guide to Afghanistan, not only did I get a year-long approved written script to start my career in media with, but I also re-discovered the golden days of my country. I found in it the tales that my grandma had told me as bed-time stories, but this time they were told and endorsed by a foreigner.

Nancy’s historical guide to Afghanistan was the first non-text book I had ever read, the first book that introduced my own country to me, a teenager brought up in war, who had experienced nothing but gloom and conflict. Nancy’s half a century work on Afghanistan history and culture captured the image of the golden days of Afghanistan, preserved it and then presented it to new generation, a generation that had seen nothing but misery. Her work strengthened the younger Afghan generation’s sense of pride in our golden past, and gave a reason to be optimistic for a glorious future for us in/for Afghanistan.

A mural of her appeared on a Kabul T-wall 48 hours after her death with the message, “My hero,” on top. This was something that Kabul and Kabulis hadn’t seen for quite some time, the picture of a real hero, uncontested and non-controversial.

Nancy’s life and death proved wrong the Afghan proverb which says, “We don’t have living heroes or dead villains.” She also proved wrong the accepted definition of what it means to be a present-day Afghan hero. We now have a proven case that has broken through all the usual limitations: to be a hero, you do no need to be from a certain faction, or represent a particular faith group, quite oddly and surprisingly, you do not even need to be a man. You simply need to be Nancy Dupree with a sustaining love for the country and its people.

 

Nassim Jawad, former director, Austrian Relief Committee for Afghanistan in Pakistan

I knew Nancy and her late husband Louis Dupree for many years, especially from the time when Afghan refugees were pouring into Pakistan in their thousands and both Nancy and Louis were heavily engaged in helping refugees, while maintaining neutrality and integrity in a place that was packed with foreign spies from countries around the world.

Nancy and Louis helped preserve our literature and thereby our culture, reminding Afghans that cultural integrity will eventually help us become a free society again.

Their home in North Carolina, which I had the privilege to visit in the 1980s, was filled with their notebooks from their journeys beginning in the 1950s and 1960s and textbooks, journals, internationally published literature and books on Afghanistan from all over the world.

When Louis passed away in the 1990s, Nancy sold her house, transferred all the literature to a regional library with the condition that as soon the situation permitted, it should be transferred to an Afghan library. She promised to spend the rest of her life in Afghanistan and with Afghans, serving our dear country. And she did so, as aside from short trips to the US, attending medical check ups etc, she spent her last years permanently in Afghanistan.

Nancy has been a true Afghan and I always wished we had a few dedicated Afghans like Nancy – we would have been much better off. She has left a huge vacuum behind. However, she worked hard in the last 10 to 15 years to train, build capacities and empower Afghans to take on the challenges and take responsibility for their own affairs. During my last visit in Kabul, I met some of the great young Afghans, Nancy’s students, who I believe will continue in her path.

As the Afghan proverb goes: “Nancy has been framed in the mirror of our hearts…” and will remain there forever and Afghans will not forget her. She has passed away, but her spirit will guide many bright young Afghans to follow the path and make Afghanistan once again a great country.

 

Andrew Wilder, Vice-President United States Institute for Peace, Asia Programmes

My first memory of meeting Nancy was in Peshawar around 1990 at the first Louis Dupree memorial lecture that she organized to honour her husband.  I had the good fortune to know and interact with Nancy off on since then, although I must admit that many of these interactions involved Nancy scolding me. For example, during the 1990s she was constantly scolding many of us NGO workers for not consistently submitting our NGO reports for her collection of grey literature at the ACBAR Resource and Information Center (ARIC).

When I was at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, AREU (2002-2005) in Kabul, she was extremely persistent in her requests that we provide a regular supply of readable publications in Dari and Pashto for her innovative and invaluable project to provide box libraries to communities all over Afghanistan.

I feel very fortunate that during a visit to Kabul in early September, and thanks to an email from Jolyon Leslie about Nancy’s condition, I had the opportunity to have a final visit with her in the hospital just one and a half days before she died. Although she was very frail, her passion for preserving and educating a new generation of Afghans about their history and culture was alive and well. It was fitting that our conversation ended with her scolding me for not recently visiting her pride and joy, not to mention her lasting legacy — the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University. While on my way to Kabul airport a few days after Nancy died, I was very pleased to see a beautiful image of her transforming one of the ugly cement blast walls at Massud Circle into a work of art.

Nancy in the stacks at the ACKU Credit: Joel van Houdt

 

Sippi Azarbaijani-Moghaddam, development worker

In 2000 I had already been working extensively for a few years with women inside Afghanistan. I was about to start managing a programme providing independent gender advice to the aid community as a whole. I decided to check in with Nancy who used to run ARIC from an office in a leafy suburb of Peshawar. We met in her office where my eye was drawn left and right and up and down by books, small artefacts, postcards and posters – all fascinating. For a tiny lady I had heard she could be very intimidating but we hit it off straight away, found our ideas were exactly on the same page and became friends. In those days the aid community was small, so we all had time to have long discussions on issues of concern or our plans and dreams.

She also loved cats. I will never forget, at the height of Taliban oppression of women, she and I were involved in a research project together. I walked over to her home with my dog. We sat calmly discussing a Taliban edict banning women from work as at least ten of Nancy’s cats sat around us and stared at my well-behaved dog.

Once the Taliban fell, Afghanistan was deluged by expatriates and Nancy became the shrine everyone wanted to visit. We kept in touch once in a while and her incredible mind kept track of who we all were. I was always amazed that she remembered every single one of us. I will miss her sharp mind and all her incredible anecdotes about travelling in the lost world of pre-war Afghanistan.

This is my tribute to her:

If anyone is alive right now and resonating with passion, it’s Nancy. Inside a tiny frail body was an enormous soul, like the genie inside Aladdin’s lamp. Nancy was an interpreter of how Afghanistan has expressed its soul for thousands of years – through the mud face of a Buddha here, a rock carving there, a scrap of writing by a young refugee in a muddy camp, the research paper written in a wood-panelled library somewhere in the world. She collected and curated all of these expressions of Afghanistan’s soul into an extraordinary and unique legacy.

Afghanistan lives and breathes and tosses and turns, and there is Nancy with notebook and pen telling us what Afghanistan is saying. Some of us are fortunate enough to find a passion in life. Nancy found two: Louis and Afghanistan. And she single-mindedly focused on those two passions. We all wove in and out of her life, but her passions remained strong and constant, and they drew people to her.

Nancy with young people at ACKU. Credit: Joel van Houdt

Nancy could help everyone see where Afghans had been, and she was excited by where Afghans wanted to go and where they could go. Nancy introduced different generations of Afghans to that past, skilfully narrating the turbulent and exciting journey for new generations. She showed every single young Afghans crossing her threshold the solid foundations of their homeland, built on thousands of years of civilization, and with that the possibility to build incredible structures in the future. Through her work, Nancy held up a mirror reflecting a glorious version of Afghanistan back to itself, an extraordinary heritage and one to be proud of.

Nancy’s Afghanistan was a vibrant place and she lived in the thick of it, never separated from her Afghanistan. Countless young of all nationalities were inspired or exhorted to get up, to leave their computers and desks; and to get out into the heat and the dust, and the snow and the mud, and above all to explore her Afghanistan.

Nancy understood better than anyone that knowledge born of passion and love, penetrates the mind, soul and spirit. That knowledge flows through us and changes our inner landscape, it nourishes us and makes us verdant when once there was desert. She has joined the community of men and women who for thousands of years shone like beacons in beleaguered places and preserved knowledge in that part of the world. She understood that the most powerful change comes from the child whose head is full of ideas, not bombs and bullets. Nancy is a Sufi master, calling everyone to her house of knowledge borne of passion and love, introducing everyone to her Beloved, Afghanistan.

She was infected by a passion for an Afghanistan made of light, and she infected every single person she touched. If the thread of your fate took you into Nancy’s office you became pulled into the weft of her unique Afghan carpet. She did not care about anything except helping everyone see Afghanistan as a treasure. Nizami Ganjavi, the poet, writes that everything is a game except the game of love and Nancy understood that and lived her life with exceptional passion.

For those of us not from Afghanistan, Nancy showed us the Afghanistan that we all fell in love with. It is the Afghanistan which has inspired us to get on a flight and go over there once, twice, a hundred times. She reminded us why we had Afghan fever, and her vision of that Afghanistan remained constant, even when the rest of us lost sight of it. Nancy’s Afghanistan went beyond the fighters, the power struggles, the corruption and the abuse, which became compulsive viewing for some.

Her gift has given Afghans access to knowledge, the possibility and the vision for a future based on who they already have been a decade ago, a century ago, a thousand years ago. Nancy’s Afghanistan – she had such an eloquent, skilful and convincing way of showing that Afghanistan to so many different audiences that she left us mesmerized and that’s how Nancy created her tribe. Maybe it is time we start calling ourselves the Nancy-zai.

 

Hermione Youngs, development worker in Afghanistan or with Afghans 1991-2016  

Nancy and I first met in 1992, and soon realised we had one thing in common,  our husbands died on the same day in 1989, this certainly cemented our friendship from then on.

When she decided to return to Jalalabad we travelled from Peshawar over the Khyber Pass together. What stories she told me of her and Louis adventures, and what an insight I was given into their love.

A 25 year friendship filled with laughter and fun, never to be forgotten – thank you Nancy.

Nancy and Louis before the war.

 

William Reeve, BBC Kabul correspondent, 1990s

I much enjoyed being on the board of her wonderful project, as she moved all the thousands of documents up from Peshawar to Kabul.  I will also never forget her old Land Rover, which she sold to me for $1,000 at Christmas in 1993.  She had it with Louis for about 15 years in Afghanistan, and then in Pakistan for a further 15 years.

It was somewhat of a historical document in itself.  Michael Wood used the Land Rover for filming the journey of Alexander the Great through Afghanistan.  It finally broke down half way up the Panjshir Valley, and they had to carry on their trip on donkeys!

 

Hanneke Kouwenberg, health worker in Afghanistan in the 1980s

A newspaper report about the opening of the ACKU in 2013, entitled “‘Grandmother of Afghanistan’ Nancy Hatch Dupree says it may be time to move on,” began with the sentence: 

With the center open and documents finally secure, Dupree thinks it may be nearly time for her to step off the stage.

It ended with:

“I need to do something,” she said. “But I guess like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

By times, Nancy was talking about moving back to the States to retire at her and Louis’ house there, while at the same time saying, “Well, I am thinking why I should make the effort, I would want to come back to Afghanistan anyway. I am not finished here yet.”

Many of us have heard this on many occasions, for many years. It had started already in Peshawar, and we all use to say: I believe it when I see it. Well, we all know now: She is staying!

Nancy often expressed especially her trust in the younger generation of Afghanistan. She loved surrounding herself with young people. “They are the future and they have the right to learn about their history in their own country.”

Her dedication to the country and the people she loved so much will continue in the legacy she and Louis left behind for many generations to come. Their many books, research and writings, the Kabul Museum, the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University.

And not the least, Nancy’s spirit which touched upon everybody who had the honour to meet her. When Nancy believed in something, she went for it with great determination and charm. Luckily enough, otherwise there might not have been a Kabul Museum nor ACKLU in Afghanistan.

There is a lot left to be done for all of us who are touched by “the Afghan Virus” – mind you, it doesn’t go away – because as Nancy once said: “Political agendas rate higher than the well-being of the Afghan people.”

She had many names: Grandmother of Afghanistan, Crazy old Lady, That busy old Lady, Mrs Dupree, Nancy Jan, Ancient monument of Afghanistan…….but for me and many others she will be missed as just: “NANCY.”

 

Anders Fange, former director Swedish Committee for Afghanistan

Nancy Dupree will be remembered as a clear and sober voice among the multitude of foreigners who too often see their engagement in Afghanistan in terms of their own or their own countries’ interests.
She will be remembered for her firm belief that the Afghans, in the end, will prevail against the decades of war and misery. 
She will be remembered for her unyielding confidence that the most important potential in Afghanistan is its men and women, and that they will be able to create a future of peace and prosperity for which they all are longing.

She will be remembered for her persistent commitment and steadfast work for Afghanistan and its people, for never giving up her quest, for stubbornly fighting until the unavoidable end.

Yes, Nancy Jan, you will certainly be remembered. May you rest in peace.

Nancy among the roses at the National Museum in Kabul. In 1974, she published a guide: “The National Museum of Afghanistan.” She was one of the few who knew where the museum’s most prized treasures were hidden during the mujahedin and Taleban eras, when much of what was left in the museum was looted or destroyed. Credit: Joel van Houdt

Picture credits: Many thanks to David Gill and Joel van Houdt for permission to use their photographs and to the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan: the black and white picture of Nancy and Louis is taken from “Afghanistan Over a Cup of Tea; 1995 – 2010, 58 Chronicles by Nancy Hatch Dupree”, published by the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, translated by Norman Burns, 2010 (2nd edition).

Edited by Kate Clark

It is 40 days since the historian, archivist and activist on behalf of Afghans, Nancy Hatch Dupree, died, aged 89. As a tribute to this remarkable woman, we are publishing two pieces. The first is an interview which Nancy gave in 2007 to Markus Hakansson for a book authored by Nancy and published by the Afghanistan Swedish Committee, which features 58 chronicles about Afghanistan. In this interview, Nancy tells how she came to Afghanistan and fell in love with the country and with her husband Louis. She describes the fifteen wonderful years they had, excavating archaeological sites and with her writing guide books. She tells of the 1978 coup, Louis’ imprisonment and there eventual exile to Pakistan where they set up a project to collect and collate information. The extract ends with her eventual return to Kabul. AAN will publish a second dispatch which will be a collection of tributes from people who knew Nancy.

Nancy Hatch Dupree moved back to the Afghan capital a few years after this interview took place. In 2013, she inaugurated the Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University in 2013 (six years after she secured initial funding for it of two million dollars). A description of the centre, which houses the now 100,000 document archive and provides research facilities to all, can be found here). AAN’s obituary for Nancy can be read here.

The following is an extract from Markus Hakansson’s “A Chat with Afghanistan’s Grandmother”, taken from Afghanistan Over a Cup of Tea; 1995 – 2010, 58 chronicles by Nancy Hatch Dupree, translated by Norman Burns, Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, 2010 (2nd edition). 

“It’s important to remember that it is often simply chance that lies behind decisive things that happen in your life. That’s been the case in my life anyway. That I ended up in Afgha­nistan was nothing more than pure coincidence,” says Nancy Hatch Dupree, an American living in Peshawar in Pakistan, close to the border to Afghanistan. When she is not working, and that’s not very often, this cultural worker who lived in Kabul between 1962 and 1978 likes to relax and lean back with a good detective story, preferably one by Ian Rankin.

Holland House is the name of the building where the Country Director of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan lives and it is here on the veranda that Nancy Dupree and I are sitting on the first day of our interview. It’s a nice, warm day. Not too hot. The cars honk as they drive by the closed gate, lacking up a little cloud of dust. But in our enclosed garden we can hear the pleasant chirping of birds. A thought comes to me that I mustn’t forget to ask about a special bird that means something special to Nancy. But I’ll wait for a while with that. Right now, I’ll/be content with underlining one of the points I have written down for this conversation: the hoopoe.

We are sitting right in the heart of Kabul, a city dominated by contrasts. It’s a beautiful city in all of its raggedness, genuine in spite of foreign military columns, hospitable but still strange. I have been here once before, in 2004. But since then, they have erected more buildings, and taller ones. Buildings with green or blue facades, just like in Dubai. But the neighbours of these glass giants are still small simple mud houses where people buy and sell, talk and make noise, live their lives. This is a city full of life but also a city where security has become much worse in the last few years, as it has in the country as a whole. Suicide bombers in the summer of 2007 are still a relatively new pheno­menon. For me as a westerner, restrictions are many and I can only imagine how the true Afghanistan really is and try to take in the impressions I experience in my immediate surroundings. Instead, it will have to be through Nancy’s stories that I will manage to see and feel the real Afghanistan. It is through her shrewd eyes that the brown dust is dissipated and the Afghanis­tan that once was makes its appearance.

“Why Afghanistan?” I ask when I finally get my technical gear in order – an mp3 player with dictaphone function. ‘“Why did you end up here and why is it that you have chosen to spend your entire adult life here?”

At first sight, Nancy looks like any sweet old grandmother. She is small and slender and speaks with a frail but self-confident voice. She could easily be taken for a person whose daily routine is filled with baking cookies and drinking coffee. But instead, here we have an eighty-year-old woman who is cherished and surrounded with such respect, such esteem that she has almost become a legend. And wearing a patterned tunic with matching wide trousers and scarf, she seems to hover over the streets of Kabul. Here, everyone knows who she is and when I tell people why I am here in Kabul this time, I am met with jealous glances and comments.

One day, and this was a long time ago, Nancy was standing with her [first] husband, an American diplomat in the Pakistan city of Lahore, at the Khyber Pass on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. “We ought to make a trip to Afghanistan next time we get some time off,” she said. He was not thinking of safety in those days. He liked the fashionable hot spots with zazzy nightlife.

However, back in Washington, it didn’t take more than a year or so before he came home from work one day and said: “Well, your wish has been fulfilled. I have been stationed in Kabul, Afghani­stan,” Nancy jumped for joy. He looked disgusted. That was in 1962.

As a young student at Barnard College, the women’s branch of Columbia University, Nancy had her sights aimed at a career in music. She played the harp and from what I understand, there were times when it really sounded quite good. Her parents had spent a lot of money on an expensive harp and soon she was a part of the professional world of music. Her music teacher obviously felt that Nancy had talent as she often took her along on her musical tours. They played duets and were especially sought after around Christmas and Easter when churches for some reason are particularly interested in harp music. Nancy and her teacher toured all over the United States, in and out of cars, trains and buses and always dragging those cumbersome instruments behind them.

“That was a very special period in my life but… it didn’t take me long to realize that this wasn’t what I wanted to do. This was not the way I wanted to live my life.”

Nancy wanted to travel overseas and told her parents of her plans of putting her harp playing aside for a while. Her musi­cal career was exchanged for studies in Chinese language, history, art history and economy.

It was during her student years at Columbia University that she met her [first] husband-to-be and they were soon to be stationed in Lahore. Her days were taken up simply enough by being a housewife. But she had actually had a job during an earlier stationing in Iraq as an editor for a small news bulletin with a limited circle of readers consisting of embassy staff.

Then came that day in 1962 when the big move was made to Afghanistan. After only a short period of time, Nancy’s husband was called upon to make his first field trip. A whole staff of people were to go along with him and they were all up in the air about the trip which was planned for Bamiyan. Nancy was de­signated to be the guide for the trip. Upon their return to Kabul, a great dinner party was thrown to celebrate the ambassador’s safe return.

That evening, Nancy found herself in conversation with two gentlemen. Mr Abdul Wahab Tarzi was the head of the newly established Department of Tourism. The other gentleman was a French archaeologist. Tarzi asked what she thought of Bamiyan. As the good wife of a diplomat, she was expected to respond with a fitting answer, something along the lines of how fantastic it was, the landscape, the culture and the people, eve­rything was just extraordinary. That would have been a suitable response. But Nancy is a person who doesn’t make a secret of what she thinks, whether it is fitting for the situation or not. “Mr Tarzi, it’s a scandal,” she said. “Bamiyan is one of the most beautiful places in the world. And you don’t even have a guide. I know I must have missed half of what there is to see there!”

Mr Tarzi responded in his kind Afghani manner: “You’re absolutely right. You ought to do something about that!” The Frenchman, who had up to now only stood in the background, steps into the discussion. He asks Nancy if she likes to have tea and gossip with the other diplomat wives. “Not at all,” she said. “A waste of time.” “Do you like to play bridge?” he continued. “That’s even worse.”

Mr Tarzi listened with interest and finally said: “Then I think you ought to take it upon yourself to write a travel guide on Bamiyan.”

Nancy could hardly conceal her excitement – a mixture of both pleasure and nervousness. “Okay, Mr Tarzi,” she said. “But I won’t write about anything I haven’t seen with my own eyes. You have to send me back there!”

And that’s the way she started writing her guide books. She soon had a manuscript finished, except for a few prehistoric details that she couldn’t get straight. She started asking around without any results until someone said “Ask Louis Dupree. He knows a lot about that sort of thing.” “Louis who?” was her only response.

I take a few pictures of Nancy as we are sitting there on the Holland House veranda and every time I click off a shot (or at least the first 30 to 40 pictures) she gives an audible sigh. She doesn’t seem to be very fond of being photographed. Suddenly I understand why she doesn’t have a single picture from her early years in Afghanistan. She has quite simply disliked the idea of being caught in the camera’s eye. After searching numerous photo archives, on the internet and in people’s computers, I have only found four or five usable pictures from Afghanistan of the 60s and 70s with Nancy in them.

Nancy and Louis examine an archeological find. Louis was determined that Nancy should work alongside him. “He kept pushing me to write,” she said, “to lecture and do research.” They had fifteen years of working and travelling all around Afghanistan before the 1978 coup forced them into ‘exile’.

After a number of persistent attempts, Nancy finally made contact with the great Louis Dupree. The American archaeolo­gist, who visited Afghanistan for the first time in 1948, had three degrees from Harvard and a Bronze Star for his efforts as a para­trooper in World War II. She left her manuscript with a few page references and two questions. Silence. Then one day, he finally got in touch with her and let her know that he had read through what she had written. Nancy was summoned up to his office, got the manuscript in her hand and saw immediately his notes up in the right hand corner of the first page: Adequate but nothing original. “I was furious but tried to keep calm,” she told me.

I have stopped reflecting over the surroundings, spellbound by Nancy’s tales just as anyone is when listening to someone who really knows how to tell a story. I kind of get the feeling that what she is saying is important and I listen intensively to every word. Besides, her descriptions are certainly not lacking in humour, far from that. Her choice of words, intonation and timing – everything just right. I glance at the dictaphone and see that it is ticking away — that’s good, I don’t want to miss anything.

“Dr Dupree,” Nancy said. “I am writing a guidebook and I’m extremely happy that you find what I have written adequate. This is not a doctoral dissertation and there is no need for it to be original.” She immediately turned around and made for the door.

But before she managed to leave the room, she heard a shout from behind the desk. “Hey, wait a minute! Get back here!” Nancy stopped, turned around and went back to the professor sitting there behind his big desk. And she never left…

I recall that I am supposed to ask about some kind of bird, a hoopoe, that played an important role in Nancy’s life.

After finishing her work with “The Valley of Bamiyan” in 1963, Nancy was commissioned to produce another guide book. Pu­blished in 1965, “An Historical Guide to Kabul” was to become a classic and it didn’t take long before a third book, “Herat – A Pictorial Guide” (1966) was on the way. During the next few years, Nancy wrote three more guide books well worth reading: “The Road to Balkh” (1967), “An Historical Guide to Afghani­stan” (1970) and “The National Museum of Afghanistan” (1974).

In order to obtain some peace and quiet, Nancy used to ride by horse to Paghman, a small mountain village outside of Kabul. Mr Tarzi was a bit puzzled by this un-Afghan behavior and thought that maybe something was wrong. Maybe she was suffe­ring from depression or something. He just couldn’t understand that she simply needed peace and quiet to be able to do her work, her writing. He often came by and checked up on her and one day when he was there, he saw a bird, a hoopoe, building its nest on the lawn where Nancy was sitting.

“Oh, look! A hoopoe,” said Mr Tarzi. “You know, in Afghani­stan we say that if a hoopoe visits you and builds its nest nearby, you’ll have good news before sunset.”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with me,” Nancy tried to fend him off. “That bird is one of my horse’s friends. Whenever I take my horse out for a ride she always comes along.” But she still couldn’t forget what Mr Tarzi had said about so­mething pleasant awaiting her. “Of course there isn’t anything in that story!”

But the same evening… Louis had left his diggings up in the north to come and pay a visit to Nancy. As always, it was a fond reunion and the same evening, Louis proposed to her. “I was head over heels, in love with that man and I almost fell over with happiness. And I never really could get rid of the thought of that special bird. I become quite fascinated by it and the myth surrounding it. I collected information and wrote an article called “An Interpretation of the Role of the Hoopoe in Afghan Folklore and Magic.” In this article, you can read about the Hoopoe’s im­portance for Afghanistan’s different ethnic groups, how it brought King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba together and how, not surprisingly, it got its name for its distinct call: hup-hup-hup.

Nancy and Louis were married in February of 1966 in Bagh-e Bala, a beautiful palace on the outskirts of Kabul, built in the 19th century. “It was a big, big wedding,” Nancy tells me. She wore a royal blue velvet dress and Kabul was clad in winter white. Snow on your wedding day brings happiness and prospe­rity to your marriage if you are to believe the Afghan tradition.

Unlike her previous marriage, Louis was determined that Nancy should work alongside him, and that’s the way it turned out. “He kept pushing me to write, to lecture and do research. If it hadn’t been for Louis, no one would ever have heard of me.” This may be true, but the statement gives a true picture of Nancy. So much experience, so much knowledge, so well appreciated and praised and still this unobtrusive profile when speaking of her own achievements.

The sound of Kabul traffic accompanies our conversation. Cars with mufflers in need of repair, screeching noises from trucks. People talking from every direction. Sometimes the noise level gets so high that we have to take a break in our little talk and then get back going when things calm down a bit. It wasn’t like this in the 60s.

“I guess we thought we knew about everything there was to know in those days, but really we didn’t know much at all. The 60s were really crazy. Parties, always parties! We were often in the company of the elite of Afghanistan but there were foreig­ners there too, mostly diplomats and researchers and so on and so forth. We thought we were in the swing but we didn’t know enough to understand that we were only a part of a facade. We drank and ate and figured we were terribly sophisticated. Seve­ral of us had horses and we rode a lot together.”

On the weekends they took pleasure trips to Paghman and in the winter they went skiing. Along the road to Ghazni there was a little ski cabin. Not many of them were much good at skiing but this was just one more way for them to get together. Af­ghans themselves were better skiers than most of the westerners.

“No, I can’t ski. I spent my time socializing up there in the cabin. Funny that we didn’t get tired of each other!”

Nancy and Louis made a lot of trips together all around Afghanistan to either Louis’s excavations or surveying to find new sites for his excavations. “It’s dangerous up there for you,” said many Afghans when we told them we would be going to Badakhshan for a few months of digging. “You can’t trust the people up there. Things are bad and there’s not much water or food. You’ll get sick.”

At the start, Nancy shared the prevailing view that Afghan women were repressed. She had all the stereotypes clear in her mind and thought she knew. She’d read books about this. Louis wasn’t any “Indiana Jones” – type and always wanted to live among the people. So Mr and Mrs Dupree usually rented a house in some small town way out in the country and in this way became a part of the village for a short time. It didn’t take long for Nancy to realize that all of these prejudices about Afghan women were 100 percent false. She learned to see the strength of the rural woman. She witnessed mutual respect between men and women. She heard women say to their husbands who wan­ted to have a meal put on the table: “I’m busy with something else, make your own lunch.”

Nancy tells about fantastic harvest times when everyone in the village – men, women and children – worked together out in the fields picking melons or peas. She began to understand that women in the countryside were considerably freer and more inde­pendent than women in the city. “I had to do a lot of re-thinking.”

Back in Kabul she told people about her new insights. “I proba­bly shouldn’t have done that because now I became a so-called expert in the area of women in Afghanistan and women’s role and position in the family and society and so on and so forth. And then there were a lot of lectures, articles and reports. I am not saying that everything was perfect and beautiful out in the countryside. Far from that. Most people lacked access to basic things like health care and education. But when it comes to women’s independence and their view of themselves, they were much better off than their sisters in Kabul.”

At this time, women in Kabul wore burqas but had begun to leave the home and were seen more and more often out in the city. At the same time, western media proclaimed the view of the repressed woman and how women were forced to wear clothing that covered them entirely with only a net in front of their face to see through. “Things were going in the right direction but westerners lacked insight and knowledge of the past and insisted on presenting a picture of the ‘repressed’ woman.”

And things did keep going in the right direction – many were the women who began leaving their burqa at home. Headscarves, jackets and skirts that reached down over the knees, dark, stretch tights and gloves were all the new thing – that was in the middle of the 60s. The next step was short skirts and hot pants, with stretch tights under of course, and high-legged boots. Towards the end of the 60s however, conservative elements started getting upset and talked about sexual allusions. The new style got to be too much for them and soon these ‘scantily clad’ ladies in lipstick were being the subjects of harassment.

When Nancy first came to Afghanistan, tourists were just begin­ning to discover the country. First came the hippies. But they were mainly only on their way through, in search of some guru in India or Nepal and only stopped long enough to get hold of some Afghan Black – hashish that was considered the very best brand. However, more affluent tourists soon began to be attracted to Afghanistan. It was people who had done some traveling in Outer Mongolia, Iran and China and were now looking for something else, something new and exotic. Package tours started to go to Afghanistan, a growing business.

“The first groups were quite demanding. They had come over here to Afghanistan to get a different experience but still demanded spacious single occupancy rooms, running water, electricity, hotel bars and the like. They wanted to rough it but still with every comfort you can imagine. In many countries around here, there is a lot to see everywhere. Afghanistan is not like that. It takes eight hours from Kabul to Bamiyan – eight hours of what? – nothing! And I didn’t want them to go home unsatisfied with their visit. That’s why in my guide books I try to keep my readers busy with sights every second or third mile – a building of a special style, folklore, popular traditions, agricul­ture etc – just to keep these rich tourists, who don’t have any patience, entertained. I think that’s the reason my guide books are still used. Roads have changed but the scenery is intact –people, traditions, clothing and homes still look very much the way they always have.”

Nancy and Louis had their own offices at home in the Shahr-e Nau area in Kabul. Nancy’s office was in the main house and Louis sat in one of the buildings in the courtyard. Many people came to visit, and they stayed so long, that in the end neither Louis nor Nancy got anything done during the daytime. They were forced to make a few simple rules: if you hadn’t booked a meeting, you weren’t admitted in by the guards.

“A lot of people probably thought that we were audacious but what were we to do? We decided to open the doors at five each af­ternoon – and then everybody was welcome. The 5 o’clock follies were born and became an institution that lasted for many years.”

In Kabul at this time you could go to jazz clubs, eat ice-cream in an ice-cream parlor or go bowling. As to “the Follies’, ‘Louis Dupree wrote the following in one of his chronicles from the 80s: “Nancy and I spent about 50 percent of our time away from home. But when we were at home in Kabul, we didn’t want to be disturbed. Both of us spent a lot of time writing, but at 5 o’clock every day we opened the bar. And most of the time lots of people came to our little parties. It became a tradition and even Russians came. But also Pakistanis, Indians, Koreans, Germans, Frenchmen, Swiss, Canadians and British.”

When the coup took place in 1978, the Duprees were in China. Under the surface, mobilization had been going on for a long time, something they would hardly have noticed if it hadn’t have been for Louis’ contacts with Kabul’s intelligentsia – university people and dissidents. When they returned to the country and applied for a renewal of their research permits, something which was abso­lutely necessary in order to receive a residence permit, they were refused. Afghanistan had a new regime, communists were at the helm and the Duprees were forced to leave the country. Banished.

“That was in August. We wound up in Pakistan for a few months but went back to our house once to fetch our winter clothes. That was when they picked up Louis and took him away. He was put in prison. They figured he was hooked up with the CIA and the situation was really serious. Louis saw several of his old friends from the Follies beaten up so badly that he could hardly recognize them. The interrogators kept shouting at him ‘Dupree – CIA, Dupree – CIA…’ They just couldn’t get it through their heads how anybody could stay in Afghanistan for 25 years with­out some ulterior motive – he must be a spy. As it turned out, the new regime had such specific information concerning our meetings and parties that it suddenly became quite evident that they had wormed their way into the Follies.

However, Louis was soon set free and they could return to Pakistan where they applied for a residence permit directly from the Minister of Interior, who was a close friend of theirs. But Af­ghan authorities had got there first and informed the Pakistani government that if they granted the Dupree’s a residence permit it would be regarded as an act of hostility towards Afghanistan.

“We were told to ‘go somewhere’ and keep quiet. Things would cool down we were told. And obviously they did because we soon had a permit to stay in Pakistan. Not in Peshawar, however, since that was so near the Afghan border and would have been regarded as too provocative. We settled down in Lahore but continued to drive to Peshawar. In the decision it didn’t say anything about visits being forbidden. We became regular guests at the old Dean’s Hotel in Peshawar. And they always let us stay in the same old room, number 22. Soon there was a plaque on the door, “The Dupree’s Suite’.” During this period of exile, Nancy and Louis also spent some time in the U.S. where they taught at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and Duke University.

Louis would never again see Kabul even though he was in Afgha­nistan with the Mujahideen several times. Nancy has never moved back but is a frequent visitor from her home in Peshawar. [Nancy moved back to Kabul in 2007/08.]

“A few months ago, I met an elegant elderly gentleman who had something to tell me. His tone of voice gave him away immedia­tely. This was important, at least for him. He said: ‘I just want to say I’m sorry. I have wanted to apologize for many years now. It was I who signed the document which meant that you would have to leave the country almost 30 years ago. I didn’t want to but I had to. Orders came down and there wasn’t anything else to do than just sign.’”

A similar thing had happened in Peshawar several years pre­viously when Nancy met the man who had been responsible for Louis’ imprisonment. “I was the one who informed on Louis,” said the old man. “I have lived all these years with a terrible pain in my heart.”

“People are forced to do strange things in strange situations,” Nancy says. “And this was truly a peculiar time. Revolution or military coup or whatever you want to call it. They were just in­struments. None of them had any personal reason for throwing us out and there is no reason for me to become upset after all these years. I don’t think people should carry around feelings of revenge with them. Life is too short for that sort of thing.”

In the beginning of the 80s, things were boiling under the surface in Peshawar – with the military coup that had just been carried out in Afghanistan, with Mujahideen soldiers and un­dercover activities. Dean’s Hotel became a sort of base for these activities. Founded in the 1920s by an Englishman, Mr Dean who was a good friend of Nancy’s father, the hotel had been built in classical colonial style. But time had taken its toll on the old hotel that was now only a shadow of what it once had been. Louis was working for international support for the Mujahideen movement in its struggle against the Soviet troops. Nancy’s ef­forts were focused on Afghan refugees whose numbers were in­creasing daily in the camps which just kept growing and growing during the entire ten-year Soviet occupation.

“In Peshawar I also got to know Carl Schonmeyr who was busy laying the first building stones for what would soon become the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan.”

An elderly man with a teapot comes out and fills our cups. It’s almost time for lunch. A police siren is heard coming closer and passes by just outside the gate. An electrical generator growls as it starts out on the yard and a couple of men in shalvar kamiz and pakhol begin to unload bricks from a truck for some building project in the area. They help each other and gesticulate and argue about where they should tip the bricks.

Louis died of lung cancer in 1989. After 23 years of shared hap­piness based on great mutual love and respect as well as all the work they had done together, suddenly he wasn’t there any longer.

“I took over his classes at Duke and Chapel Hill and it wasn’t un­til after the classes ended I realized fully what I had lost. I lapsed into a period of deep depression. Louis and I had worked so close to each other and the feeling of emptiness that I experienced got the better of me. I missed him so terribly and just couldn’t see a future without him. What shall I do? What will become of me? It felt like life was over for me. It was as if there wasn’t any sense in going on. But somehow I managed to get through this time even if deep feelings of loss and grief still come over me now and again.”

ACBAR, Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief, was founded in 1988, the year before Louis’ death. It was the result of the fact that there were so many volunteer organizations in Peshawar at the end of the 80s and they needed help with coor­dination. One organization had no idea of what the other was doing. “It was a complete mess,” Nancy recalls.

Nancy and Louis became involved in ACBAR and Louis was given the business of investigating the possibility of starting a center where it would be possible to obtain everything that had been written about Afghanistan – everything! Louis was sent home with the task of starting to make lists. When he presented his conclusions, a few days later, he said:

“Ladies and gentlemen. In the first place, so much has been writ­ten about Afghanistan that it would be impossible to get it all together in a single library. The second thing is that it would cost too much. And even if we could find all the literature and the money to buy it for, we wouldn’t be able to afford to store the collections safely. And most important of everything: if we did manage to get around the first three problems, only about one percent of these books would ever be used or opened. In short – this is the wrong way of doing things.”

Louis proposed instead that they should work on an investigative basis, collecting and listing new reports. Both internal reports and reports from the UN and other organizations. Only the most im­portant of the old works should be included as reference literature.

Nancy did not return to Afghanistan before April 1992 when the Mujahideen took over power [after which inter-factional fighting led to the destruction of a third of the city and damage to most other parts]. When she arrived, she thought that it could possibly be an emotional experience to drive around the city and see the old areas where she and Louis had lived and worked together. But to her great surprise, she didn’t feel anyth­ing. Everywhere ruins and dust – and all those sandbags.

“When I sat in the taxi that drove me around the city, I felt ab­solutely nothing – this wasn’t the Kabul I had left. It wasn’t my Kabul any longer.” The taxi driver asked Nancy if she wanted to see her old house. The thought had of course crossed her mind but she had pushed it away. “I didn’t want to destroy the inner picture I had of our former home. But that stubborn taxi driver insisted and soon we were there and I was knocking with the same old funny iron ring that still hung on the front door of Louis’ and my house in Shahr-e Naw.”

The door opened and they were met by two young women. The taxi driver told them who he had along with him and the young women smiled warmly and asked Nancy to enter. “I was relieved to see that our old house had escaped being damaged by all the rockets and grenades. The garden looked a little unkempt but I still recognized it.”

It was here the 5 o’clock Follies used to meet and discuss matters. That was a long time ago. “I looked especially for the geranium that I had planted a long time before next to the place I had buried my lovely old cat. I smiled when I saw that it stood there in full bloom.”

But she still didn’t feel anything. ”Was I emotionally dead? There must be something wrong with me.” Nancy drove on and visited an old friend. She entered a dazzling garden in fantastic, colors, well-cared-for and enchantingly beautiful.

“That was when I broke down completely and couldn’t get up from the bench I was sitting on. I just sat there and cried and cried. Everything came all at once. Memories, Louis, my Kabul, all the fun times of the past. It all just flowed over me. Then I realized without a doubt that I had some feelings left in my body.” That was Kabul as Nancy remembered it.

It was during the difficult time just after Louis’ death that ACBAR called and told her that they had accepted his idea on building a resource center with Afghan documents and litera­ture. They had started with the project but needed help getting things rolling. “Today we have 38,000 volumes in our collection. No, wait a minute, 40,000.” Nancy tells me proudly.

The collections were stored for a long time in Peshawar. It was only after the presidential election in Afghanistan in 2004 that she dared to take the risk of moving them over to Kabul, where they rightly belong. But where would everything be housed? One thing she was sure of: these collections must be in a place where Afghans themselves can study their own history. The obvious place was of course the university and soon a shipment left Peshawar with the destination of Kabul University. “It all went exactly as planned. We didn’t lose a single document in transit. 299 sacks, all transported over a period of several months with private Afghan trucks.”

The flow of new reports, documents and literature into the col­lections increases every day. The library has been full for a long time and now new premises are needed, and quick! Blueprints for the new building on the campus are finished. Land has been earmarked for the project and Nancy has a document with the sig­natures of all the important people, including President Karzai’s, which establishes the fact that the project will be a part of next year’s budget. But still, not much has happened. It has been outmaneuvered in the corridors of the bureaucracy. “I need two million dollars and I need them now,” Nancy almost shouts out these words as she brings her fist down on the table.

We eat lunch together. We go for a drive. We sit and talk together. Nancy constantly points at different buildings and tells me how they once looked and I try to take it all in. Traffic is frightful in Kabul nowadays with yellow taxis – Toyota Corollas – honking and crowding together in great flocks at every intersection. They mingle with white development aid jeeps with gigantic antennas on the front of the vehicle and here and there a Russian Lada or Volga. And right in the middle of all this, trudge old men and don­keys pulling their squeaky fruit carts apparently untroubled by all the racket. We are on our way to the university for a visit to The Afghanistan Centre at Kabul University, ACKU, which earlier, when it was in Peshawar, was called the Afghanistan Research and Information Centre, ARIC and fell under ACBAR.

I am quiet as I walk through the Kabul university library. An ingrained behavior. Some students sit with their heads buried deep in books opened on the table in front of them. Some of them look up, some of them make no notice of us. Grayish-brown Kabul dust has formed a light veil on every square inch of every shelf. There are a lot of books here but there are still some big holes on the shelves. There’s room for more literature, that’s good. We go through the library and in one corner we approach a glass door. We open it and step in, right into the col­lection of reports, documents, books newspapers and magazines. Right into the historical identity of Afghanistan. This is her lifetime achievement. Hers and Louis’.

It’s really cramped inside the ACKU and it didn’t take more than a fleeting glance for me to see that they are already outgrowing their allotted space. The new building that Nancy intends to build out on the campus area must be built as soon as possible, right now, in fact. A few employees are busy sorting through and scan­ning material in order to make it available via electronic media. I exchange a few words with some young IT-fellows who, from what I can see, seem to know what they are doing. Nancy shows me around. It’s so tight that I have to walk sideways in order not to pull down the books and document holders around me. She shows me a display case of a library box. These boxes held about 200 books and were sent out into the countryside so that those who had learned to read at one time wouldn’t forget what they had learned. The books were mostly technical literature that could be used in daily life. But they could also include books of a lighter nature such as storybooks and books on toy-making. Library boxes proved to be a lengthy success when they were introduced in the middle of the 90s.

Nancy needs to do a few things and asks me to wait outside the library. I sit down in the shade. It’s beginning to get a little war­mer now. The real heat of summer was long in coming this year and even if it is June it’s not over 25-26 degrees (about 80°F) in the middle of the day. But warmer weather is on its way they say and I wonder if it’s starting now. Some students hurry by. Girls in jeans, tunic and headscarf and boys in jeans and shirt. Decent and yet comfortable. The campus is attractive with extensive green areas that have run a bit wild. The trees growing here have managed to survive the struggles that have taken place in the area during the past few decades. Trees are worth a lot in Afgha­nistan – there aren’t so many of them.

On a couple of occasions during our conversation, mainly when we speak of Louis and his excavations, Nancy mentions a speci­fic object with an odd name.” What exactly is ‘Daddy’s head’?” I finally ask her.

“About this big,” says Nancy and measures up about 3 inches between her thumb and index finger. “In limestone. It depicts a head and is from the stone age. It’s the oldest artefact that has been dug up in this part of the world.”

When Louis found the little stone – the head – at one of his dig­gings, he took his time before telling the world about his unique discovery. It was first when five or six experts had taken a look at his find and confirmed its authenticity, first then did he go out with the news. That was in “1971. He asked the government for permission to take it with him to the U.S. in order to get the media attention it deserved. “Sure,” came the answer. “But if you lose it you’ll owe us half a million dollars.”

Louis put the head in the pocket of his jacket and nonchalantly threw it up on the shelf when he later got on the plane. Nancy was worried to death and kept her eye on Louis’ jacket the whole trip. She even asked their children to keep a sharp eye on it. In the States, the find was shown on television and received a large spread in several newspapers, including Time Magazine

“So we arrived in New York, the stone still in Louis’ jacket pocket. In an elevator full of people who looked like robots, all identical with dark suits, white shirts and briefcases, Sally says suddenly: ‘Daddy, do you still have your head in your pocket?’ The robots turned to life and the stone had got its name.”

On the way back to Afghanistan, in Teheran. Louis had put “Daddy’s head” in a matchbox, something which Nancy had some decided views about. “Louis,” she said. “Now you have let the world know about this fantastic little stone. Do you feel comfortable about returning so priceless an article to the state of Afghanistan in a matchbox?”

No sooner said than done. They visited a local jeweler who sho­wed them around in his shop. But all Nancy was looking for was a little velvet box. She finally found one, a red one, and “Daddy’s head” could be returned in what Nancy considered a worthy package. “Daddy’s head” in its new velvet box was locked in and a replica was used for exhibits.

“When we recently, only a couple of years ago, opened the vault where valuable museum pieces have been kept under years of war, everything was still there. Fantastic old artefacts of inde­scribable value, everything was there. We started by making an inventory of the gold.” The fact of the matter is that only a few people knew what actually was in the vault that had been locked for so many years. The “Bactrian gold” as it is called, includes 20,600 objects and not a single one was missing when the vault was opened.

“The museum staff are the real heroes. This treasure is intact today thanks to the fact that staff members didn’t say a word about what was hidden in the six vaults. The rest of the world was sure that the gold had been stolen when the museum was plundered during the war, but museum personnel knew better and have been able to keep their secret for all these years.” said Nancy in an interview with the New York Times journalist Carlotta Gall in June 2004, just after the opening of the vault.

But outside the vault there were still big sacks full of additional museum pieces. “I received an email recently from an old friend who told me she had been there when the first sack was opened. And there, right on top, she found a remarkable little bundle wrapped in brown paper. She tore off the paper only to come to another layer of paper, newspaper. She continued peeling the bundle and under the newspaper she found toilet paper and then tissue paper. And there, at the heart of this shapeless little bundle lay ‘Daddy’s head’. I had supposed that the little stone head had disappeared because even with a knowledge of ar­chaeology, ‘Daddy’s head’ could easily have been taken for any other uninteresting, insignificant stone. But some wise person obviously knew what he or she was doing when ‘Daddy’s head’ was wound into these many layers of paper.”

It’s a new day and we are sitting on the veranda of a house in southern Kabul. This house belongs to the New York Times, and it is here that Nancy most often stays when she visits Kabul. There is a fantastic garden around the house with a fine green lawn. I notice that the blades of grass are of a thicker quality than what we are used to in Sweden. Climbing grapevines and flowers in bright colors surround us. Nancy loves gardens and she says that Afghans do too. “Nowhere else do you find people so in love with their gardens as you do in Afghanistan.”

That’s the way it has been and still is in many respects, but on the way here I noticed a lot of newly constructed buildings used as show pieces where they seem to have completely forgotten about gardens. The buildings themselves take up almost the entire lot. Nancy doesn’t like that. But what is worse, a lot worse, is that many of these buildings are symbols for the widespread corruption that is found everywhere today.

“There was corruption before too, of course, but not in the same way as today. It’s become an epidemic. It’s terrible to see people completely unrestrained constructing such buildings when it is so obvious that they are being built with dirty money. Besides, they are ugly and for me it’s so un-Afghan to erect a building without a garden.”

In Durham in North Carolina in the US, Nancy has a beautiful garden – if you can call a lot of five acres for a garden. “It’s so peaceful there in spite of the fact that it lies in a built-up area, but it’s too big a house for me. Much too big. Our plans were that Louis and I would settle down and grow old together and finish up all of the projects we had started. I go over there now and again but not so often as before. Now I’ve got to get hold of those 2 million dollars for the new ACKU center so I can get things cleaned up here and get back to work on all the unfinis­hed projects in that house in Durham!” When I just recently asked Nancy to have a look at this text she wrote back: “We have the 2 million now and the drawings are complete so we can look forward to some action at the site before the end of the year.”

Nancy has three children. Actually they are Louis’ children from a previous marriage, but Nancy sees them as her own and treats them as if she were their real mother and the children treats her as a real mother. The oldest daughter is married with a Cana­dian, the youngest, the one who coined “Daddy’s head” grooms, dogs, and… you see … I am so old that my grandchildren are in college,” she says with a laugh followed by a minor attack of coughing. Nancy’ also has a sister, Sheri Mathias, eleven years’ younger. She lives in Mexico and is strangely enough a musician. Yes, that’s right a harpist. She started where Nancy left off.

Nancy’s mother, Emily Gilchrist, was a Broadway actress and li­ved with her husband, a developmental aid worker Duane Spen­ser Hatch, in India when she discovered that she was pregnant. That was in 1927. “My mother said to my father in a very definite way, ‘Duane. this child is going to be born in the U.S. Maybe it’ll be a boy and he may want to become president someday. I’m not going to let my child start out on the minus side.’ They took a train to Calcutta and then a ship to the U.S. To Cooperstown. My birthplace. I turned out to be a girl and besides a girl who couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the president of the United States. When my mother became pregnant again eleven years later, she wasn’t so particular and my sister was born in southern India.”

Nancy has often been asked the question why she chooses to stay on in Afghanistan in spite of all the problems she and others have to live with every day. I think it has something to do with the people here, the Afghans. She always speaks with esteem of Afghans, in a natural and respectful manner, as if she were talking about something that resembles the soul of a people or a national character.

“They are tolerant and full of respect as a people. They have a feeling for what is important in interaction with other people. Here they can look you in the eye and figure out whether or not you are genuine. If they detect that you are trying to ingratiate yourself with them, they are polite in return. If they discover that you are honest and sincere, you have a friend for life. This is a dis­tinguishing feature that I like and I see it around me all the time.”

Nancy is sometimes associated with a special epithet. It got its start in Peshawar. “The Diplomat was the name of a new magazine that had just come out. And on the cover of the first issue there was a picture of me. Under the picture I could read the text: Afghanistan’s Grandmother. I was furious. ‘Look what they’ve done,’ I said to the people at the office, I got no reaction at all. Finally, one of them said: ‘What’s the matter? You are like a grandmother to us. When we have problems we always go to you, no matter if they are personal or job related. We can always discuss things with you, just like we can with our own grand­mothers’. It dawned on me that that the whole thing was just a cultural clash.”

Confounded by the epithet, Nancy only saw a decrepit old lady in the grandmother image. But her colleagues saw a person with experience of life with whom they could willingly consult and discuss things. “Suddenly I felt extremely honored by such an epithet. And it stuck. ‘Hi grandma,’ is what I hear when one of Karzai’s top advisors calls.”

Nancy with three crazy Afghans in a car at Khyber Pass on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their car is stopped at the roadblock and a guard takes a look in the car. The driver, a doctor says: “We’re all Afghans.”

The guard looks at Nancy and then back at the doctor again “Not her. She’s not Afghan.” The doctor demands to see the guard’s superior officer. Nancy pleads with him to take it easy and starts waving her permit in the air. Anything to prevent a dispute.

The doctor is called from the car and into a sentry box. He is soon back and when the car gets rolling again, she asks him what happened in there, what he had said. “Ah, take it easy,” the doctor answered. “I just told them that you’re my grandmother!”

When Nancy first heard of the Taliban she just dismissed them from her mind. She hardly figured they were worthy of any notice. They took Kabul before anybody really understood what was happening. Nobody seemed to believe they had the capacity to do such a thing. They occupied all governmental departments and if you wanted something, you had to go through them. “I had a good deal of contact with the Taliban since I was the acting director of ACBAR for a short while. It soon became evident that those who had taken over the minister posts had bitten off more than they could chew. They didn’t have a clue but they knew that they were the ones making the decisions.” When Nancy called on the Planning Minister on one occasion, he called in question the work she was doing. He was dubious about deve­lopmental aid organizations as a whole and claimed that this was his area. He was the one who made the decisions here.

“I explained to him that aid organizations work along with the government in a complimentary manner, providing what they were unable to provide and that we had no intentions of taking over and exercising power and so on and so forth. He listened carefully – you could see he wanted to understand. I had several meetings with him and in the end we became good friends. He was genuinely interested in understanding and finding the best solutions for us so that we could work together. And I wasn’t alone when it came to realizing that it actually was possible to cooperate with the Taliban,” Nancy says.

But soon, the Taliban became more radical and stricter in their views about things in general, more suspicious. Osama bin Laden’s influence increased and his men flowed into the city. The ministers whom Nancy had gotten along so well with were dismissed and exchanged by real hardliners. Al-Qaida took over more and more and she realized that the Taliban leader Mullah Omar had lost control of things when the Buddha statues in Bamiyan were blown up. “I was in Paris when it happened – a horrible event for the entire world. A part of our universal heri­tage just completely vanished.” But Nancy dismisses the idea of reconstructing the statues.

“They weren’t just statues or monuments. They represented something higher, something greater. If they are to be rebuilt without the religious conviction behind them, they will be just another tourist attraction. I’m simply against it. Build a museum there instead and show the world how it looked at one time. The residents of Hazarajat will lose income from the lack of tourists, but what is left, the empty niches and the fantastic landscape, are still inspiring. Already we see that interest for the place is still alive even if the Buddhas aren’t standing there any longer.”

On our third and last day together, it is time to make a visit to the Kabul museum. We drive toward Darulaman, where the bomb-shattered palace with the same name lies up on a hill right next to the newly restored museum. We drive through an area that was hard hit by battles around Kabul during the civil war.

Visiting the National Museum of Afghanistan with Nancy Hatch Dupree as a guide is a privilege granted to only a precious few – a better guide can’t be found anywhere. Her imprints on the muse­um are plain to see. Besides the fact that Louis has dug up a large number of the museum artefacts directly from Afghan soil, Nancy has been so intensely connected to the museum that she knows it as well as she knows her own living room. She knows everybody and tells me about which rooms that have been restored and about parts of the museum building that no longer exist, that have been blown to pieces. We step right into the room of the head of the museum. He receives Nancy with open arms and immediately sends for tea. A bowl with candy is already on the table. The tea comes after just a few minutes. I taste a strange, fluorescent and shapeless lump, almost without any form at all, from the candy bowl, it has a peculiar taste. Nancy and the head of the museum, a lean gentleman with kind eyes, talk about everything from old times to today’s exhibition. I mostly listen. They mention that an Italian team of archaeologists is in town working with the restoration of objects which have been broken during the wars.

A bit later, one flight up, we vi­sit the room where the Italians are rummaging about. Wooden cases everywhere, metal basins, plastic buckets containing what I would describe as gravel. On some of the tables, they have poured out the “gravel” – here they are trying to lay their three dimensional puzzles. And from what I can tell, they are making progress. Here and there stand complete and half-complete sculptures, statuettes and other objects. Just like they looked some time in the past. We meet some Italians who seem to be suffering from stress. They aren’t especially interested in our presence and greet us a little indifferently – mostly wanting to get back to their work. I realize that they don’t know who I have along with me and Nancy is in­troduced. Suddenly they drop everything they are doing and just stand there gaping. ”Is it really Nancy Dupree?” someone asks.

The Italian team, four or five persons, begins to swarm around her and shower words of praise over her and ask about old ti­mes. A new Italian joins the group. “This is Nancy Dupree,” says one of them to the new arrival.

“Is that true? Nancy Dupree! Is it possible?” I realize that I am walking around the room looking rather proud of myself. Take it easy now, Nancy is actually with me. “Come on Nancy, let’s go!” She guides me through the museum. We look at prehistoric sto­ne tools, wooden sculptures from Nuristan and an ugly Buddha replica in flesh colored plastic. Some large photos, a square yard in size, are hanging on the walls. Nancy stops and points to one of the photos, a little village with buildings of mud with funny roofs. “Louis used to call those ‘tittie houses’,” she says.

We laugh at the joke and I must admit that it is a pretty ac­curate name. The roofs of the houses really do have the form of a woman’s breast. I can’t help wondering about the prevailing view towards women on the one hand and these rooftops that openly depict a naked female breast in full sight on the other. I keep my thoughts to myself and let Nancy take me further into the museum.

Outside, quite near the museum, is an unusual collection of vehicles. A somewhat rusty steam locomotive from the 20s imported from Germany, that was to transport the king from Darulaman to Kabul stands next to a row of British luxury cars that have seen better days but which certainly at one time carried political leaders and other bigwigs around Kabul.

On the other side of the road lies the bomb-shattered former parliament building. Like a wounded giant, it lies there and looks down upon us with tired eyes. What once were copper domes are today just rusty iron skeletons. Life has taken its toll on this neoclassical colossus, built in the 1920s for King Amanullah Khan. The palace is a terrible but sadly telling reminder of Afghanistan’s history. But in spite of all the bullet-holes and rockets that have shattered great parts of the once so magnificent building, it is still standing. In the same way, Afghanistan and the Afghans are still standing up – in defiance of decades of nightmarish hardships.

“Over the years, Afghanistan has seen many setbacks and I have several times thought that now the Afghans have hit bottom. Now they’re going to have a hard time getting back on their feet. But then you wake up one morning and look around and in some miraculous way, the problems have solved themselves. Let’s just hope that it will turn out that way this time too,” says Nancy in the dry and hot wind that is blowing over the plain a few miles outside of Kabul.

The afternoon is getting late and it’s time for us to drive back to the city. It will be the last trip with Nancy for now. I give her a hug when I climb out of the car at an intersection. I walk the last stretch of the way, it’s only a few blocks. A few blocks in a throbbing and rapidly growing city of several millions. And in a fascinating country which by now ought to have earned the right to stability, security and peace.

Nancy Hatch Dupree now 81 years old, will probably continue working with the stubbornness of a child. I can’t really imagine her being content with slowing down. Nancy says she ended up here just by chance but it is no coincidence that she is still here. This is her life. I can’t help wondering what Nancy’s life would have looked like if a certain little bird hadn’t built its nest on the lawn where she was sitting and writing that day over 40 years ago. A bird that says hup-hup-hup and so on and so forth…