THE pace of events appears to be quickening in Afghanistan ahead of next month’s presidential election. Analysts believe that President Hamid Karzai is likely to be re-elected, perhaps because of the presence of 38 other candidates. Most significant has been the truce agreed between a Taleban warlord and the government in the small Bala Morghab district of northwestern Badghis province. Though the deal is designed primarily to allow the construction of an economically important road into the area, a government spokesman said that it would also permit the August elections to be held in the district and added that this also meant that Taleban candidates could stand.
This agreement with a Taleban leader represents a stark change in tactics by the Afghan president. Karzai once set his face against any contact at all with the Taleban. His supporters had argued that there ought never to be a place for the country’s former rulers. Karzai perhaps imagined that NATO forces could defeat the Taleban and destroy them as a political force. That might perhaps have just been possible in the early days when they had been shattered and scattered by the US-led invasion. Their grip in key Pashtun areas could have been further weakened had the international community kept its promises of massive aid in order to transform the lives of pitifully poor Afghan communities. Their broken promises, coupled with the incompetence and venality of parts of the new government at central, provincial and district levels, dismayed ordinary Pashtuns and did not persuade them to shun the returning and regrouping Taleban.
Karzai has recognized belatedly that NATO soldiers are not going to crush the Taleban militarily and indeed that there is no purely military solution. He may also have realized that whatever NATO politicians may be saying to the contrary, their military commitment is not in fact open-ended. Taleban improvised explosive devices (IED) have been wreaking heavy casualties in recent months, not least on the British in Helmand province. The British say they have just completed the first and most important stage of their “Panther Claw” operation meant to push the insurgents out of key administrative areas. These casualties from IEDs have been having an impact on domestic voter opinion back in Britain.
If he secures a second term, the Afghan president knows that he will have to make some solid political achievements in order to keep NATO military support. That means talking to the insurgents who are fighting with the Taleban for pragmatic reasons, rather than for any commitment to a jihad. At the bottom of all their demands is the demand for removal of foreign troops.
Karzai’s task is to convince the apparently large soft core of the Taleban that NATO troops will probably seize the opportunity to quit but this can only come about if Afghanistan is largely at peace. His task would have been far easier had dramatic developmental goals been achieved by international aid. The Bala Morghab Truce is therefore all the more remarkable and, hopefully, it will be the first of many such pacts.
Detainees’ torture
EXCERPTS from the editorial that appeared in The Washington Post on Monday:
In April, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. declared that it “would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department.” He was speaking, of course, of CIA operatives and other government interrogators who complied with the “torture memos” authored by the George W. Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).
Holder was right to shield these interrogators from criminal prosecution. He is now confronted with a different question: What to do about those who may have gone beyond — perhaps far beyond — even what the OLC sanctioned?
We reject the distorted interpretations that underpin the OLC memos and that serve as legal justification for harsh interrogation techniques that either border on or constitute torture. But those who relied on the memos and shaped their behavior in the good-faith belief that they were following the law should not be subject to prosecution. It is an entirely different story for those who went well beyond the often-extreme measures authorized by the memos.
In 2004, the Pentagon reported that 34 deaths had occurred in detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan; at that time, nine deaths were classified by military medical examiners as homicides. While the Defense Department has conducted several courts-martial of military personnel in abuse or death cases, the same level of scrutiny has not been applied to civilian personnel.
Take, for example, the case of Manadel Jamadi, an Iraqi insurgent captured in late 2003 and taken to the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Navy SEALS delivered Jamadi “alive, kicking and shouting” to CIA interrogators, according to a Post account. Jamadi is believed to have died during the interrogation, while in CIA custody.
A Navy SEAL was court-martialed and ultimately acquitted for his role in the Jamadi case. Yet CIA operatives involved in the matter have thus far escaped accountability. The task before Holder is not an easy one. If he authorizes an investigation, he could be accused by some of criminalizing policy differences with his predecessors. He may also appear to undercut President Obama’s desire to leave the past behind and “look forward.” The attorney general must put political considerations aside. He should assign a career prosecutor to look at the facts and apply the law.
