Articles found August 10, 2013
Afghan EOD Take The Losses And Get It Done
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August 9, 2013:
Afghan troops have largely taken over from Americans in doing the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) work to get rid of all the terrorist (and increasingly gangster) bombs and mines. About half the 300 Afghan police and soldiers who get killed each month are the victims of the roadside bombs and mines the EOD teams don’t know about or don’t get to in time. NATO troops suffer a slightly lower rate of loss to these bombs, which indicates that the Afghans are able to be competitive in this area. The Afghan EOD troops have plenty of work. Right now most Afghan EOD teams are accompanied by a few of their American counterparts, to advise, warn, and tutor.
By American standards the Afghans are quick learners but brash and sometimes undisciplined. But each time these bad habits get an Afghan EOD tech killed or hurt, the word gets around and attitudes are adjusted a bit. Many Afghans believed the American EOD men were some kind of magicians but the work is all about precision and discipline. To some Afghans that is still magic, but it’s a form of magic an Afghan can acquire.
Right now the Afghan military has about 400 EOD technicians. The Afghan army and police are taking over security responsibility for all of Afghanistan, and currently all but the most violent areas in the south and east are protected by Afghans. That means Afghan EOD teams are taking care of most of the bombs. Afghanistan will need about a thousand of these specialists to replace the departed American and NATO EOD specialists. Currently, two or three bombs go off each day and kill three or four Afghans on average. NATO has set up an EOD school staffed with 190 EOD experts and providing 19 different courses. Much of this training prepares soldiers and police to better spot bombs and call in EOD to deal with it.
The EOD training is long (eight months) and arduous because the work is dangerous. The casualty rate is higher than being in the infantry but the pay is better and you get a lot of respect, which is a big deal in Afghanistan. The danger is not a totally negative thing because EOD always attracted the adrenaline junkies, who were skilled and disciplined enough to get through the training.
The Afghans have adopted the American attitude that only the best recruits will do and that the skills must be mastered before the new EOD techs are turned loose on the real thing. Trainees take quickly to this arrangement and all the details (of different kinds of bombs) and equipment (robots, sensor, and the full body protective suit) the job involves. Many of the new Afghan EODs already have experience working on the demining teams that have been clearing Afghanistan of all the mines and old munitions left behind by the Russians in the 1980s.
One downside of the American approach to EOD is the use of a lot of expensive equipment (special bomb suits, robots, jammers, and sensors). While the U.S. will leave a lot of this stuff behind, the Afghans are worried about keeping it maintained.
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Afghanistan's middle class: What will happen to us when the US leaves?
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After the Taliban's ouster in 2001, thousands of Afghans found high-paying jobs in Kabul. As Westerners leave ahead of 2014, many Afghans' new middle-class lifestyle may be in danger.
By Halima Kazem, Correspondent / August 2, 2013
It’s an hour before sunset and 30-year-old Besmellah Khurram is feverishly texting his group of friends to find out which Kabul restaurant they should meet at to break their day-long fast.
“Ramadan is a great time for me because sometimes I break the fast with my family and sometimes with a large group of friends at one of Kabul’s busy restaurants,” says Mr. Khurram.
Khurram and his friends are enjoying some of the luxuries that have popped up in the past decade for the middle class in Afghanistan, such as disposable income to spend on eating out and purchasing the latest mobile phones, laptops, and even cars.
However, much of this newly established and mostly urban middle class is in danger of rapidly shrinking once again as more international aid projects and nongovernmental organizations shut down ahead of the 2014 transition, when most international security forces will leave Afghanistan and the country will be expected to govern itself without the direct help of the international community.
“Young working Afghans like me and my friends are who sustain the local businesses. If we lose our jobs, many of these local businesses will fail,” says Khurram, a graduate of Kabul University’s school of economics.
Khurram works as a manager for a private sector development project run by the German Society for International Cooperation, an aid organization. He says many of his friends also work for various international aid organizations or projects run by the US military and make anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 a month, putting them in Kabul's upper middle class.
This is much higher than the average per capita income in Afghanistan, which according to the World Bank is $528. However uneven distribution of international aid and private investment have created large disparities between urban and rural income levels.
The high salaries, along with lucrative military and security contracts, have created a financial bubble in Afghanistan. Since 2001, this bubble has pushed up cost of living and contributed to the growth of the Afghan middle class, especially in urban areas.
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The Art Of Scam In Afghanistan
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August 6, 2013
Corruption in Afghanistan can be astonishing at times. That’s because Afghans consider stealing from foreigners to be a laudable goal and this is a tradition that goes back thousands of years. An excellent example of this can be seen by a recent effort by some Afghan customs officials to scam the U.S. government out of over $70 million. This was basically an organized extortion effort carried out by customs officials. It first appeared in June, when American equipment (vehicles and cargo containers) leaving the country were halted at the Afghan border by demands for a document proving the equipment had entered Afghanistan. If this document was not available (and it never was), payment of a $1,000 fine (per violation) would allow the item to pass. This in itself was absurd because a 2002 agreement between Afghanistan and the United States exempted American military equipment from anything of this nature. Senior customs officials replied that the 2002 agreement was unfair and no longer applied. At this point the situation was becoming surreal and negotiations continued as U.S. officials climbed the Afghan government chain of command, finding that the original scammers had, as is usually the case, promised all their superiors a piece of the action and all were doing their best to make the extortion plan work. Finally the U.S. agreed, but with the understanding that these fines could be paid but that the amount would be deducted from foreign aid, plus large processing fees and fines. Sensing the game was up, the scam collapsed.
Many of these scams succeed, again and again. One of the best examples of this is the “dead goat scam” in which villagers lie about who was killed by a NATO bomb in order to obtain more compensation money, and to avoid Taliban retribution. This one is quite common and works like this. Often, when a smart bomb gets dropped in an isolated location (which describes most of Afghanistan), and there is any chance of civilian casualties the locals will often make a fuss about seeking to find who was hurt or killed. The village elders insist that outsiders (as in U.S. military personnel investigating the damage) stay away during this trying time. Even the foreign soldiers and Afghan police are put off (after a quick search for Taliban bodies, documents, and equipment is completed). Being good Moslems, the villagers bury the dead before sunset of the same day. The next day, the elders will claim as many civilian dead, killed by smart bombs, as they think they can get away with. Sometimes additional graves get a dead goat or other animal, so the proper stench permeates the mound of earth. Digging up graves is also against Islamic law, so the elders know the foreign troops have to take their word for it. The elders also know that the foreign troops, depending on nationality, will pay $1,000-$5,000 compensation per dead civilian. Not only is there a big payday, but the Taliban appreciate the bad publicity directed at the foreigners and usually show their appreciation by cutting this village or valley some slack in the future. The villages encourage this by offering the local Taliban a cut of the compensation money.
This scam works because there aren't many public records in Afghanistan. The only ones who know exactly who lives in a village are the people there and the elders speak for everyone. Investigators have a hard time interrogating individuals because the elders, and everyone there, has a vested interest in not being found out. Sometimes the elders get greedy. For example, despite an intensive investigation into a 2008 bombing in Azizabad (outside Heart), the villagers got paid for over 90 dead. Investigators, piecing together what information they could, were certain that there were only 15 dead civilians (plus Taliban). But you can't touch the graves, and even questioning the veracity of the claims gets you howls of indignation.
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Why a dam in Afghanistan might set back peace
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A $200 million dam project will divert water from Iran. Afghan officials say they have no plans to negotiate water rights with Iran.
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer / July 30, 2013 Herat, Afghanistan
The water that grows western Afghanistan’s fresh produce, sprinkles its town parks with shade-giving trees, and slakes the thirst of war-weary Afghans, is becoming a point of tension with nearby Iran as a large dam under construction will constrict cross-border flow.
After nearly four decades of work, the Salma Dam – a $200 million project paid for and built by India, yet delayed by Afghanistan’s turbulent history of occupations, civil war, and insurgency – is slated to be finished by the end of 2014.
Afghan officials say they have no plans to negotiate water rights with Iran, although analysts and Western sources warn that lack of agreement could worsen Afghanistan’s already prickly ties with its Iranian neighbor.
“We have many projects in Afghanistan, and every project has its enemy. But unfortunately Salma Dam has three enemies,” says Fazl Ahmad Zakeri, the Ministry of Energy and Water’s acting director for the Harirud and Murghab River Basin, in Herat. “It’s not possible [to stop work]. We will complete this dam.”
One of those enemies, says Mr. Zakeri, is Pakistan. Islamabad is “trying to stop the work” because it is being built by strategic rival India. In April, Afghan intelligence officials announced they had thwarted a Taliban plot to blow up the dam with about 2,860 pounds of explosives. The plan, they claimed, was aided by Pakistan’s intelligence agency.
The other two “enemies” of the Salma Dam are Turkmenistan and Iran because it will diminish water flow to their own parched regions and dam projects. Afghan officials have often charged Iran with being behind dam-related attacks. When an Afghan district governor who had supported the project was killed in 2010, Afghan police officials suspected Iran’s involvement.
The head of the police unit guarding the dam claimed to have evidence that Iran funded a local Taliban commander and his 200 men who had “promised Iran that he will succeed in halting work on the Salma Dam,” according to a report by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.
Likewise, two months ago, six of the dam’s security guards were killed by a roadside bomb. Without naming Iran, the provincial security chief said that the killings had “a political motivation. This is the work of those countries who don’t want Afghanistan to develop.”
But in Herat, water official Zakeri says that “we don’t have any data to give us information that Iran is creating some problem.” Iranian officials say they support Afghan development, and deny conducting any destabilizing actions in Afghanistan, despite credible reports of past, limited assistance to anti-US insurgents, including the Taliban.
“Yes, the Iranians are asking for negotiations. Always they are asking for negotiations [because they will get] much less water,” notes Zakeri.
But negotiation may be easier said than done, with so much at stake for both sides.
What Afghanistan wants
For Afghanistan, key facts are clear: The Salma Dam will increase cultivatable land from 35,000 hectares to 80,000 hectares. It will also produce 42 MW of electricity, lowering the region’s dependence on Iran (which now provides 80 MW, cheaply) and Turkmenistan (which provides 50 MW).
“It will change much, because this project is not just for Herat,” says Zakeri. “If we can produce more fruit, we can send this to Kandahar, to other provinces. This project might change the situation in all of Afghanistan.”
For Iran, too, key facts are clear: The dam will cut the flow of its own Harirud River water by 73 percent, even though the number of Iranians dependent on that water – including the shrine city of Mashhad – is almost three times as large as the number of Afghans.
“Iran has always criticized Afghanistan for its water policies on Helmand and Harirud Rivers,” says an Iranian analyst in Tehran who has worked on the issue of Helmand, a larger river flowing into Iran farther south, and asked not to be named. “Iran and Pakistan are both accused of sabotage [and] Mashhad depends on the water of the Harirud. So Iran has a big concern that dams in Afghanistan [will] reduce the water as [they have] on Helmand.”
The 'only way forward'
A 2010 report on Afghanistan’s water resources warned that “cross-border cooperation on water is not an option; it is the only way forward” with all neighbors. Lack of bilateral or regional agreements created “a serious threat to sustainable development and security in the region,” stated the EastWest Institute report.
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Afghan TV show brings officials face-to-face with ordinary people
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President Hamid Karzai and top ministers have appeared on 'Open Jirga,' giving Afghans a rare taste of accountability.
By Scott Peterson, Staff writer / July 28, 2013 Kabul, Afghanistan
Afghanistan's imperfect democracy is finding one of its purest forms over the television airwaves, where ordinary citizens are getting a rare chance to question their highest officials face-to-face.
A debate program named "Open Jirga" is for the first time bringing a studio audience from every corner of the country to directly question the powers-that-be, from President Hamid Karzai and his ministers to the army chief. Rampant corruption, “wasted” years, and security fears of what will happen after US-led international forces drawdown in 2014 are all fair game.
A co-production of the BBC and state-run Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA), the program has given Afghans an unaccustomed taste of political accountability on a national stage.
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