Welcome to AfghanWire’s 5th Podcast, a new feature to complement our existing services. Every week we will be discussing the major news from Afghanistan, with exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis.

 

AfghanWire heard from Vanni Cappelli, a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia since the early 1990s.  He is a co-founder and the current president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association.

 

“The eruption of violent demonstrations at both ends of Afghanistan over the last ten days following instances of serious civilian casualties during American and NATO military operations in Herat and Nangahar provinces, which were followed by a tougher than usual warning by President Hamid Karzai that such civilian deaths were both intolerable and not understandable five years after the fall of the Taliban, may prove to be a watershed in a powerful psychological dynamic that has dogged the American military from the start of operations in Afghanistan in October 2001. Amidst the litany of the United States' failures in the country over the last six years, the recurring and seemingly intractable problem of egregious violence towards civilians has the potential of being the catalyst that propels a deteriorating situation towards critical mass.

 

“It is a truism of informed political commentary that the United States' almost exclusively military approach to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq is the main cause of its inability to stabilize both countries. In the case of Afghanistan, the heavy reliance on force is expressive of a number of potentially fatal flaws in America's Afghan policy: historical myopia to the overwhelming fact that force has never subdued the Afghans in the past; an inability to correctly perceive the fighting in its regional context, particularly regarding the role of Pakistan; an inept approach to the political dimensions of the struggle; and perhaps most importantly the inverse imbalance in the amount of resources the Bush administration devotes towards military operations and reconstruction.

 

“The last failing is often discussed as a straightforward interaction of guns and butter, security and reconstruction. The helpful suggestion is made that the sooner America removes the reasons for people to have sympathy for the Taliban -- and nothing would accomplish this better than transforming the wretched conditions in which most Afghans live -- the fewer the rebels it will have to fight.

 

“But when the added dimension of civilian casualties is thrown into the equation, the intensity of emotions aroused among a people for whom "badal", or revenge, is a matter of compulsory honor distorts matters beyond calculation.

 

“Ever since the initial campaign to overthrow the Taliban in the fall of 2001, the issue of recklessness resulting in needless civilian deaths has been a red thread running through the narrative of the American military's involvement in Afghanistan. Downplayed while the Taliban was still in power because of the rush and magnitude of the events that followed the September 11th attacks, it has spun exponentially as violence has continued and escalated in what was supposed to be a post-conflict, mopping up and rebuilding situation, "a war that should have been won five years ago", as one commentator has put it.

 

“The grim roll call of serious incidents is both well-known and bitterly remembered: the attack on a wedding party by Ameican aircraft that killed fifty guests in Uruzgan in June 2002; the airstrike in Ghazni that killed nine children in November 2003; the multiple incidents of civilian deaths during the heavy fighting in Helmand in the summer of 2006, etc. Taken together they have instilled a firm belief amongst the Pashtun villagers of the south, where all of these incidents took place, that in the absence of meaningful reconstruction, American and NATO soldiers are merely one more group of armed men that they must fear.

 

“At the same time the static nature of the phenomenon -- the expressions of regret by the Americans, the urgings to caution by Karzai, the announcement that there will be an investigation, the pledge that things will change in the future because the Americans are more aware of the problem, followed in the end by yet another egregious incident -- has led to a rising tide of anger.

 

“Given the potency of the underlying rage displayed when a simple road accident set off widespread rioting in Kabul in May, 2006, there is a genuine fear that one of these incidents will be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

 

“The heavy role that indiscriminate bombing from the air played in civilian deaths in both Helmand in 2006 and Herat this year has been a great recruiter for the Taliban, as they have been able to evoke images of the Russians doing the same things twenty years ago, and conflate the two foreign armies in people's minds. But as the Afghan Human Rights Commission concluded in their April report on the "road rage" incident in Nangahar in early March that killed a dozen people, American ground forces have proven themselves to be capable of equally indiscriminate actions, to a degree that constituted " a serious violation of international humanitarian standards."

 

“Fortunately, the Americans have no monopoly on an ability to provoke outrage. The extreme barbarity of the Taliban's recent actions, ranging from the beheading of an Afghan journalist to suicide bombings that directly target civilians to the videotaping of a child beheading an alleged spy in the tribal areas of Pakistan have won them no sympathy, and the totally conscious and volitional nature of these acts, with no room for explanations of "collateral damage" or "heat of battle" being used as an excuse, do inspire a certain intensity of anger that the Americans' callousness does not.

 

“Yet the flurry of recent so-called "collateral damage" incidents since early March has undoubtedly kept the focus of anger squarely on America and NATO. The fact that the raid that set off the riots in Nangahar occurred very near the infamous "road rage" incident on the Jalalabad-Torkham road that forced a withdrawal of the American Marine unit involved and the high number of civilians , including women, children, and even infants , killed in the Zerkot Valley of Herat creates an impression of recidivist callousness that could become overwhelming.

 

“Perhaps the tipping point will be whether America and NATO reform their behavior before the Taliban does.