Wednesday
Jul282010
Afghanistan: What Did Wikileaks Reveal? What I Wrote in Kabul in 2005 (Shahryar)
Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 23:57 
Editor's Note: Josh Shahryar has promised more not-so-new revelations later in the week:Nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of casualties later, the reality of the war in Afghanistan suddenly gets revealed...by Wikileaks.
Afghanistan: Why Wikileaks Should Not Be Plugged (Dissected News)
Afghanistan: After the Wikileaks “Petraeus to Stop Corruption” (Partlow)
Afghanistan & US Politics: National Interests and Ending the War (Mull)
Or so it seems if you were to believe all the major newspapers and broadcasters. There are steamy headlines, loud news analysts, and even louder pundits talking about these revelations. And what are these revelations? We have apparently just found out that:
*Pakistan is helping the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan;
*There have been more civilian casualties than announced;
*The Afghan government is corrupt and impossible to deal with;
*Afghans are slowly favoring the Taliban over the Karzai Government;
*And most importantly, the war is being lost.
The number of documents released by Wikileaks to support these points is staggering --- more than 90,000. Yet the most surprising fact is not that all these things are true, but that they have never been mysteries that needed to be revealed. Everyone apparently "knew" but had bigger fish to fry --- like Iraq (which by the way wasn’t helping al-Qaeda), Iran and its pursuit of nukes, and North Korea, minutes from unleashing doom upon us all.
But Afghanistan then, as now, was very important to one person at least. Me.
It was late November of 2005. In a dusty little office, covered in cigarette ash and alcohol stains, I was sitting behind an three-year-old laptop handed down to me by a colleague, writing at 3 a.m. I was in Kabul, Afghanistan. My country; my homeland.
I used to be a senior editor at Kabul Weekly, the nation’s largest newspaper, that attempted to cover events inside Afghanistan but rarely got any traction outside the country because the media in the "West" always thought it could rely on itself.
I churned out a story that was read by a few colleagues and some expatriates and I got a few pats on the back. A story that covered every single point that the Wikileaks documents supposedly brought to light.
Yes, we knew about Pakistan’s spy agency, InterServices Intelligence, helping Taliban and Al Qa'eda. Yes, we did know that civilians, far too many civilians, were being killed in air raids and in street shootouts. And yes, we knew of the government’s corruption, and we knew that ordinary Afghans favored the Taliban over that government. I added a couple of extra points on flaws that needed to be remedied, such as the spread of poppy cultivation and the lack of capability of the Afghan security forces.
Sadly, my editor edited out the part on government corruption because we didn’t want to be shut down. We ended up alluding to it vaguely, and I later remedied that by writing several articles on the issue, the last one published in December on EA. But everything else is there in 2005. Have a read.
Now I’d be a fool to think I’m the greatest investigative journalist in history. I don’t have any magical powers either. And Wikileaks did not send me a copy of its report 4 1/2 years in advance.
So how does someone like me come into possession of knowledge this important? Because it is right there in front of everyone to see. Then why didn’t anyone say this before? Well, they did –-- most people just chose to ignore it because Iraq was "more important".
That’s what the politicians talked about. That’s what the media covered. And yes, that’s what the general populace in the "West" cared about five years ago. If you don’t believe me, then just follow the money.
The war in Iraq has been raging for seven years: total cost $735 billion. Now, Iraq has oil and Afghanistan has no means of supporting itself except for illegal drugs. The war in Afghanistan has been raging for two years longer than the war in Iraq. So more than $735 billion invested in Afghanistan, right?
Wrong. The Afghan War has cost the US taxpayers $286 billion, a 3-to-1 inferiority v. Iraq. Less coverage and less money means one thing: less importance.
However, this does not mean that the issues I brought up weren’t brought up before. They were. Mostly by Afghan journalists, but also by some Westerners who were crazy enough to not only cover Iraq but the story in Central Asia. However, the politicians kept quiet, the media gave little air time, and, finally, the taxpayer was less informed.
Then, as if from nowhere, Wikileaks comes up with these documents and the US media has something to cover amidst the coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill, which frankly had become less than exciting.
The media wants something sensational. What better than this? The politicians are suddenly forced to answer hard questions and the taxpayers are suddenly interested.
You know what? It’s a little too late for that.
I can’t really fix what the US government does. And honestly, my attempts at publishing analyses on the situation in my own country are gently ignored by the US media most of the time in favor of American analysts who spend a few days drinking tea with Afghan warlords and lounging about the bazaars.
So if you’re a taxpayer and stumble upon me in this corner of the Web, hear me out: the war is going nowhere. A radical policy shift is needed immediately.
Pakistan has to be harshly rebuked and stopped from helping the terrorists. The Afghan government has to be replaced with a less corrupt elected government or dictator or king or something –-- something that’s better than the Taliban. And someone needs to stop the army from killing civilians. If you can force your politicians to pull that off, then you can win this war. If not, there’s another very obvious truth lying right in front of you. I’ll let you figure that one out.
Reader Comments (8)
As usual, this is a good post that makes solid and generally convincing arguments. But one point in your discussion startled me a bit, and I wonder whether you can clarify it.
In restating the main themes of an article you wrote in late 2005, you say: "Yes, we knew about Pakistan’s spy agency, InterServices Intelligence, helping Taliban and Al Qa’eda. Yes, we did know that civilians, far too many civilians, were being killed in air raids and in street shootouts. And yes, we knew of the government’s corruption, and we knew that ordinary Afghans favored the Taliban over that government. I added a couple of extra points ...." Etc.
When you say "we knew that ordinary Afghans favored the Taliban over [the Afghan] government," did you mean that SOME ordinary Afghans (especially in the south) preferred the Taliban over the government, or that MOST ordinary Afghans preferred the Taliban.
If you really meant to suggest that MOST ordinary Afghans preferred the Taliban, then I would be surprised. That's a standard talking-point in polemics urging an immediate abandonment of Afghanistan by US and other western forces, but I know of no evidence supporting this claim. Instead, all the relevant evidence I have seen, from 2001 through the present, indicates that the Kabul government and its local representatives are widely unpopular, not least for their pervasive corruption, incompetence, and faults, but the Taliban are, on the whole, even MORE unpopular than the government (especially, but not exclusively, among the various non-Pushtun ethnic groups that add up to a majority of Afghans). And that picture is consistent with everything of yours that I've read about Afghanistan.
Have I missed something? I read that 2005 article of yours for the Kabul Weekly that you referred to. The article nowhere suggests or implies that most ordinary Afghans preferred the Taliban over the Kabul government. Quite the contrary.
So did you really mean to say that "ordinary Afghans favored the Taliban over [the] government"? If so, on what basis did you say that? If not, please clarify.
Thanks,
Jeff Weintraub
Jeff,
Thank you for the comment. I actually wrote several paragraphs in reply to your question, but I figured I'll save them. I am writing a more comprehensive article on this subject in the coming few days. (Starting on it tonight). You will hopefully find very detailed and in-depth reasons as to why I made that argument.
In the meantime, honestly, I'm not against NATO ridding Afghanistan of extremist fanatics and giving people hope for the future. I have family inside Afghanistan who will be in immediate danger if the Taliban come back to power. But the truth is, this war is achieving none of the goals that were proposed at the start of it.
I have written a very long piece for the Daily Beast which will hopefully be published in the next few days which I will provide a link to in my next article on this subject and you will see to which degree Afghans need America. But if ordinary Americans are not convinced that this war is A) Winnable and B) Sustainable then what I, you or anyone else wishes is irrelevant. This article more than anything is an attempt at trying to stop people from suddenly feeling like this war should be hated because everyone's lied - which is not true. These facts were known.
Catch up with you in the next article?
Josh, great article as always. I'll look forward to your next article about this, but I have a few things to say first.
1. We knew that the ISI was supporting the Taliban and Al Qa'eda BEFORE 9/11. The evidence was there, and it was publicly available, and the U.S. government decided that it made more strategic sense to go after Afghanistan and bully Pakistan into an ally. The problem is that, as you know, Pakistan's interests in this mess are far more complicated than we know.
2. Your criticism on the media's coverage of Afghanistan is spot on. We got problems, and the mainstream media has been lying down on the job for far too long. Is it too late to fix Afghanistan now? Maybe, or maybe not, but it will take more than a new military strategy. It will take a reconfiguration of our understanding of Pakistan's role in southeast Asia.
I'm also writing an article on this subject, which will be online soon.
Peace ~ James
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Josh,
Not quite related to this topic, but this is the most recent place I could find you :-) Read this - you'll find it very moving.
The Weight of a Brick
by AIRIS MEHREGAN
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/07/photo-essay-the-weight-of-a-brick.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranb...