Pubdate: Tue, 13 Mar 2007
Source: Der Spiegel (Germany)
Copyright: 2007 Der Spiegel
Contact:  http://www.spiegel.de/international/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4118
Author: Susanne Koelbl
Note: Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

HEARTS, MINDS AND BODY BAGS

NATO Battles Rising Hostility in Afghanistan

The fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan continues this spring.
But as the number of civilian casualties rises, support for Western
troops is dropping.

The grave is 14 meters long. The white flags with golden characters
flutter in the wind at the tops of bamboo poles. The inscriptions are
verses from the Koran meant to guide the dead into the afterlife.

Abdullah Shah stands alone in the Da Mirwais mini Hadira cemetery in
western Kandahar, his hands raised to the sky. After completing his
prayers, the old man strokes his face and his white beard, as ritual
requires. Twenty people are buried beneath the mound of earth at
Shah's feet: his wife Miamato, his three sons, 13 grandchildren, two
daughters-in-law and a cousin. They died in Lakani, a village in the
embattled Panjwai district in southern Afghanistan, at 2:30 in the
morning on October 25, 2006. Their lives were extinguished by fire
from the 30 mm guns of an American A-10 ground attack aircraft, aka
Warthog.

Prior to the killings, helicopters had already been circling the skies
over Lakani for days. When the bombs began falling, patriarch Abdullah
Shah ordered his family to seek shelter in a remote mud hut. By 2
a.m., when things had calmed down, the family decided to return to the
village. But the A-10 gunners, peering through their night-vision
goggles, couldn't tell the difference between civilians and fighters.
Anything that moved was their target. The orders were clear: The
Taliban were to be removed from the region.

Caught between NATO and the Taliban

Abdullah Shah survived the attack because he stayed at home to guard
the house. His four-year-old granddaughter Aqida also survived, but
she was hit in the spine by a piece of shrapnel and will never walk
again. The child is now in Germany. Near the end of last year, the
German military flew her to Cologne, where she was first treated in a
children's clinic and later taken in by an Afghan couple in Germany.
Aqida could be returned to Panjwai by the end of the month -- to a
place that has become a war zone caught between NATO and the Taliban.

The Western alliance hopes to make this year a turning point in the
Afghanistan conflict. With the offensive it launched last week in
Helmand Province, the alliance plans to head off its opponents'
expected spring offensive. Alliance members agree that the terrorists
cannot be allowed to regain control of the country it liberated from
the Taliban and al-Qaida. But NATO's double-pronged strategy of
reconstruction and military strikes comes at a high price. As civilian
casualties mount, so too does animosity against Afghanistan's Western
liberators. Five adults and four young children were killed last
Monday in Kapisa Province north of Kabul when a NATO fighter jet
dropped a 900-kilogram bomb on a mud house. According to a NATO
spokesman, rebels had fired rockets at the NATO base in Kapisa and
taken refuge in the building before NATO forces launched their
counterattack.

A day earlier, US troops killed nine civilians and wounded 34
bystanders, some critically, on the road to the Torkham border
crossing into Pakistan, 50 kilometers (31 miles) east of Jalalabad.

"The Americans shot at everything that moved," says an eyewitness who
was also wounded. "They aimed at people in cars and at pedestrians."
Immediately before the attack, a suicide bomber had been driving a
minibus loaded with explosives toward the US patrol.

Human shields

Of the 4,000 people who died violent deaths in Afghanistan last year,
about 1,000 were civilians. Most of the victims were killed when
Western soldiers found themselves in "complex ambushes," the
expression military spokesmen use to describe the Taliban's strategy
of using civilians as human shields.

Most of the suicide bombings are also intentionally committed in
civilian surroundings, part of their purpose being to create ill will
within the population against the foreign troops. The strategy seems
to be working, at least in the Pashtun region where very few
reconstruction projects have materialized. Last week thousands of
angry protestors marched through the streets of Jalalabad, furiously
shouting "Death to America! Death to Karzai!"

The fronts of this new war are difficult to define, but it is still --
as Abdullah Shah and his family discovered -- possible to become
caught in between them. Shah, a native of Kandahar, is 68 and
illiterate, and yet he led his extended family through the country's
various crises and periods of unrest for 40 years. His clan survived
the Soviet invasion and the civil war in the early 1990s. He even
reached an understanding with the Taliban, even if the Islamists
forced him to hand over one of his sons for the fight. Had he not done
so, he would have been driven from his land.

Now, though, Abdullah Shah's farm in Lakani is abandoned. The
chickens, sheep and cows are gone, and Shah doesn't even know whether
they were stolen or simply ran away. Distant relatives in a
neighboring village have taken him in temporarily. Caught as they are
in the middle of the conflict between the Taliban and international
forces, life has become difficult for the residents of southern
Afghanistan, who don't know to whom they should turn for protection.
The government is too weak, NATO is often fighting primarily to
preserve its own security and the Taliban is infiltrating the villages.

Key to Afghan opium production

"If there is to be a spring offensive, it must be our offensive," US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in late January at a meeting
of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels. That offensive began last
Tuesday at 5 a.m. local time, when 5,500 troops -- the British,
Canadians, Dutch, Americans and 1,000 Afghans -- launched "Operation
Achilles" in the southern Helmand Province, a predominantly Pashtun
region. The aim of the NATO operation, led by Dutch Major General Ton
van Loon, is to liberate villages in the region from extremist rule.
The area is key to Afghan opium production and is one of the Taliban's
most important strategic and economic bases.

Five months ago, the British signed a regional truce after heavy
fighting and many losses. Under the terms of the agreement, tribal
elders agreed to keep the Taliban out of the region. But when the
British withdrew, the agreement fell apart and, by early February, the
Taliban were back in control.

=46rom his hideout in the border region between Afghanistan and
Pakistan, Mullah Dadullah, the Taliban's one-legged military leader,
recently issued the self-confident announcement that 6,000 fighters
were ready for the spring offensive. That number is said to include up
to 2,000 suicide bombers.

Likely, much of this is propaganda meant to make the allied troops
nervous. At 40, Mullah Dadullah is already one of the Taliban's more
seasoned veterans. He is considered especially violent and is known to
have ordered videotaped beheadings of "infidels" and "collaborators"
alike as a scare tactic. His boastful announcements are intended
primarily to intimidate NATO and the government in Kabul. At the same
time, he hopes to encourage young Pashtun men, among the country's
poorest residents, to join the fighters. It has also become difficult
for the Taliban, which has lost hundreds of fighters, to recruit new
blood each year.

In the 1980s, the Taliban's predecessors, the mujaheddin, found
popular support for their struggle against the Soviet invaders. But
today, few families are willing to sacrifice their sons. They sense
that the international troop presence, as unpopular as it is, is
probably their last best chance to escape a vicious cycle of
oppression and poverty. Nevertheless, many face a daily struggle to
survive, creating a perfect climate for recruiting mercenaries. If
they are to fight, many Afghans reason, it will mainly be for money.
The Taliban currently offers 30,000 Afghani a month -- roughly =80500
- -- and a motorcycle to those willing to fight for pay. The government
in Kabul pays its civil servants --- teachers and police officers
alike -- barely =8050 a month. Tribal leaders, feudal lords

The new offensive in Helmand will also serve as an acid test for
whether the Western allies can continue their reconstruction projects
in the most fiercely contested regions of the country. More than five
years after the US invasion, Afghanistan is still among the world's
poorest countries, a place where countless people live like slaves
indebted to warring tribal leaders or feudal lords.

The main objective of the new NATO offensive is to secure the Sangin
Valley and the Kajaki dam in northern Helmand Province. If the plan
succeeds, they hope to repair a major power plant that could supply
electricity to almost 2 million Afghans. The NATO-led ISAF troops, and
even the Americans, have now realized that they can only win the
"hearts and minds" of their Afghan allies by significantly improving
their standard of living.

The Taliban, for its part, is trying to impede technological progress
at all costs, knowing full well that its power will dissipate as soon
as Afghans see improvements in their lives or be able to find jobs.
But if the extremists manage to up the number of civilians killed in
battle, the Afghans will be more likely to stand behind the Taliban.

In short, this is far from a holy war and never was here in the
permanently ungovernable south. The Taliban has entered into a
strategic alliance with the powerful smuggling mafia that operates
between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Far from supporting the
establishment of a caliphate, the smugglers are only interested in
drugs, weapons, women and holding on to power.

The population, for its part, wants piece -- but is preparing for a
lengthy war of attrition. Fear of the international troops is
palpable; when a NATO patrol walks around a corner in Kandahar, every
child remains frozen in place. The Afghans know that any unexpected
movement could produce a deadly reaction. Most young NATO soldiers sit
in their armor-clad vehicles, their fingers on the triggers of their
machine guns, watching the outside world on a monitor. A red target
marks every potential danger -- and death is never more than two
clicks away.

Just what the foreign soldiers are good for is difficult for the rural
population to tell. They speed through the dusty landscape in their
outlandish vehicles, periodically engage the enemy, and then return to
their fortified bases. In the strategically important Panjwai district
in Kandahar Province, entire villages have been leveled because
Taliban fighters were using them for cover. Convenient targets

Poor security is still the Afghans' biggest problem. The police,
rarely on hand when they are needed, make convenient targets for the
Taliban, interested as they are in intimidating the locals. Miserably
trained and poorly paid or not paid at all, Afghanistan's police
officers often abuse their power to extort bribes from the very people
they are meant to protect. It's a situation that results in many
villagers preferring to see the Taliban keep the peace. They say that
although the Taliban may not have brought development to the country,
it did provide stability. The current government has been able to
offer neither.

Examples are many. Since the Taliban government was thrown out in late
2001, many rural areas no longer have judges to address the countless
disputes over land or water. Cases of murder or robbery go unpunished.
In some places where the Taliban has regained control, many believe
that harsh justice is better than no justice at all. And those places
are multiplying. The Taliban has already recaptured entire regions in
the southern Kandahar, Helmand and Zabul provinces, and it is also
making inroads in the country's east, primarily in the Khost region,
and in Paktia and Paktika provinces. Taliban fighters infiltrate these
areas in small groups, either from neighboring Pakistan or from the
Hindu Kush Mountains, forcing villagers to hide them in their houses
- -- and turning local residents into human shields.

Anyone suspected of cooperating with the government in Kabul or with
foreign troops lives in mortal danger. In the space of just 10 days
last month, extremists murdered seven government officials in the city
of Kandahar, including two mullahs and two lower-ranking police
officials. The murderers waited for their victims on motorcycles in
front of their houses and shot them with Kalashnikovs as they drove to
work in the morning. Not even the employees of public transportation
companies can feel safe. Anyone seen as a collaborator risks being
punished.

Meanwhile, the increasingly courageous members of private aid
organizations are demonstrating that development and reconstruction
are possible in war zones. Senlis Council, a British aid organization,
provides assistance to refugees throughout most of the country's
southern portion. German engineers recently completed an important
4.3-kilometer (2.7-mile) connecting road in the embattled Panjwai
district. Non-governmental organizations are offering their assistance
to anyone, friend or foe. It's a strategy that usually works, but not
always. Last week, unknown assailants shot and killed German aid
worker Dieter R=FCbling, who had worked for Deutsche Welthungerhilfe
(German Agro Action), in Sar-i-pul in northern Afghanistan.

It's a difficult balance and the challenge facing NATO is huge. On the
one hand, it must prevent the Taliban from recapturing the country. On
the other hand, it cannot afford to gamble away its last remaining
support among the population. As have the Americans. Once celebrated
as liberators, the US has largely lost its credibility among Afghan
civilians as a result of its not-always considerate behavior. Now the
Europeans are likewise on the verge of losing respect. This dilemma
sometimes prompts diplomats and military officials in Kabul to
consider radically new approaches. "Why don't the Americans pull out
altogether and leave reconstruction to the Europeans?" high-ranking
European officials ask themselves in private. But they don't dare
express their ideas openly -- for fear that someone could actually
take them seriously.

Toothless groom

But if the numbers of civilian casualties cannot be reduced, the West
could face a serious backlash in Afghanistan. Widower Abdullah Shah,
who lost almost his entire family to NATO fire, has become something
of a symbol in that struggle. When his fate became known throughout
the country, President Hamid Karzai met with Shah in Kabul. Karzai
sent him on a pilgrimage to Mecca and made arrangements for his
paralyzed granddaughter Aqida to receive treatment in Germany.

Abdullah Shah took advantage of his meeting with the president to ask
Karzai who would compensate him for the loss of his family. Karzai
offered Shah two pieces of property and encouraged him to look for a
new wife and remarry. Since then the widower has been in negotiations
for the hand of his new bride-to-be. The woman he has chosen is only
around 30 years old, and because of the advanced age of the now
largely toothless groom, her family is demanding a high price: 800,000
Afghanis, or about =8012,000.

"Men are always in such a hurry," the Afghan president said when asked
by SPIEGEL whether he would pay Abdullah Shah's bride money. "I
promised him I would, and I will keep my promise."

The Afghans are apparently capable of solving at least some of their
problems in their own way -- the way they have been doing it for centuries.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Steve Heath