Author: Sanjeev Miglani

Members of the Black Watch, 3rd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland at the Black Watch Memorial at Aberfeldy in Scotland following the end of their deployment in Afghanistan. By Russell Cheyne

The British Ministry of Defence has apologised after Muslims complained that it was using replicas of mosques at a firing range  in northern England to train soldiers ahead of deployment in Afghanistan.

Relations between Muslims and the military are already fragile, so what’s the point of  testing them even more by suggesting that mosques were places of danger, the Bradford Council of Mosques said, according to The Independent. The green-domed structures erected at the end of the firing range in north Yorkshire must be taken down, the council said.

A British military source told Reuters that the one-dimensional hardboard structures are not used as direct targets  but are intended to provide a more “realistic” background for soldiers training ahead of deployment in Afghanistan.  Other “generic eastern silhouettes” used include palm trees and irrigation ditches to recreate the Afghan setting soldiers would face there.   It was never the intention for the structures to look like or replicate mosques, the Defence Ministry said,  offering an apology if any offence had been caused. It said it had sought a meeting with the representatives of the community to find a way forward.

It’s not like they recreated a whole Afghan village with a mosque in it to familiarise soldiers,  says Ishtiaq Ahmed, a spokesman for the Bradford Council of Mosques.  “If they had a replica of a street or a village in Afghanistan with a mosque as a kind of location point we would understand that, but these are simply six or seven structures in the direct shooting line which anyone looking at would come to the obvious conclusion that they are mosques.”  Community leaders are even more angry because the provocation comes just when they were trying to help the army recruit more Muslims, the BBC said.

Is it really the best way to win Afghan hearts and minds for soldiers starting their tour of duty ? Or a staggering own goal ?

Some people think its a bit of an over-reaction and even misleading. Douglas Murray, writing in The Telegraph blog, said the fact is that British, and U.S. troops for that matter, are forbidden to fire at mosques or other places of worship under the rules of engagement.  But that will be forgotten in the current uproar, he says and instead the idea that soldiers are trained to shoot at mosques will get embedded.

(The niche that once held a giant Buddha, in Bamiyan. Picture by Omar Sobhani)

For those pushing for high-level political negotiations with the Afghan Taliban to bring to an end to the eight-year war,  two U.S. scholars  in separate pieces are suggesting a walk through recent history  The United States has gone down the path of dialogue with the group before and suffered for it, believing against its own better judgement in the Taliban’s promises until it ended up with the September 11, 2001 attacks, says  Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute in this article in Commentary.

Rubin, who is completing a history of U.S. engagement with rogue regimes, says unclassified U.S. State Department documents show that America opened talks with the Taliban soon after the group  emerged as a powerful force in Kandahar in 1994 and well over a year before they took over Kabul. From then on it was a story of   diplomats doing everything possible to remain engaged with the Taliban in the hope it would modify their  behaviour, and that they would be persuaded to expel Osama bin Laden who had  by then relocated from Sudan.  The Taliban, on the other hand, in their meetings with U.S. diplomats, would stonewall on terrorism  but would also dangle just enough hope to keep the officials calling and forestall punitive strategies.

Over a five year period of engagement, the United States gained little while the Taliban grew even more radicalised and the threat from al Qaeda more serious. Rubin details how State Department officials were repeatedly misled by Taliban officials harbouring bin Laden even after two U.S. embassies were attacked in Africa in  1998.  They even told them they would protect the Buddha statues in Bamiyan which were subsequently destroyed.

“The Taliban had like many rogue regimes, acted in bad faith.  They had engaged not to compromise, but to buy time. They had made many promises, but did not keep a single one. The Taliban refused to isolate, let alone, expel Bin Laden , and al Qaeda metastasized,” says Rubin. The Sept 11 attacks were plotted at a time when U.S. engagement with the Taliban was in full swing.  (more…)

If you can’t beat the Taliban, buy them out. At last week’s conference in London, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s Western backers endorsed his latest attempt to lure away low level Taliban fighters with money and jobs,  committing themselves to a $500 million fund to finance the re-integration plan. The logic is that a majority of the Taliban , 70 percent actually according to some estimates, are the so-called “$10 fighters” who do not share the leaders’ intense ideological  motivation. They are driven to the Islamists because they are the only source of livelihood in a war-ravaged nation. So if you offered them an alternative, these rent-a-day foot soldiers can easily be broken.

Quite part from the fact that several such attempts have failed in the past, the whole idea that members of the Taliban are up for sale  just when the  insurgency is at its deadliest is not only unrealistic but also smacks of arrogance, Newsweek magazine notes in an well-argued article.  It quotes Sami Yousoufsai a local journalist “who understands the Taliban as few others do”  as laughing at the idea that the Taliban could be bought over.

“If the leadership, commanders, and sub commanders wanted comfortable lives,  they would have made their deals long ago. Instead they stayed committed to their cause even when they were on the run, with barely a hope of survival,” the article says quoting the journalist.  Now the Taliban are back in action across much of the south, east, and west, the provinces surrounding Kabul, and chunks of the north.”They used to hope they might reach this point in 15 or 20 years. They’ve done it in eight. Many of them see this as proof that God is indeed on their side.”  Indeed one Taliban member reacted angrily to the idea of a buy-out. “You can’t buy my ideology, my religion. It’s an insult,”he said.

At another level, come to think of it, if theirs is a force largely made of rented foot soldiers,  the Taliban have done exceptionally well  taking control of large parts of the country massed against the world’s biggest military powers. Imagine what it would be like if this wasn’t just a $10 a day army as Karzai and his allies paint it to be and instead a proper fighting force.

So why would they defect ? And just how realistic is this ?  The relatively few Taliban who did accept Karzai’s previous offers to return to society live virtually in self-exile in Kabul, afraid to go to their homes in the countryside where the Taliban won’t spare them. Some of those it had spoken to, Newsweek notes, wanted to go  back  to the Taliban,  but they know they won’t be forgiven. So its a real problem, where do the Taliban go, even after Karzai offers them gobs of money. ” They wouldn’t want to live in expensive Kabul, where people on the streets would make fun of their country ways, huge black turbans, and kohl eyeliner. They hate everything that Kabul represents: a sinful place of coed schools, dancing, drinking, music, movies, prostitution, and the accumulation of wealth.”

Breaking an insurgency with money or turning ex-fighters against the insurgents is an old tactic. Indian forces did something similar in Kashmir to weaken the 20-year-revolt, back in the 1990s. They  backed the creation of a force  or the “Ikhwan” , many of them ex-fighters to take on the insurgents. For sometime the pro-government militia  managed to inflict casualties, but it was a force, by the very nature of things, assembled to serve a purpose and then left pretty much to its own fate.. “We are dying  a dog’s death,” I remember one of the members of the militia telling me, as the insurgents helped by intelligence from local villagers picked them off one by one in a matter of a few months. The Indian state, which had backed them earlier, had washed its hands off  by then.

The problem is also how do you trust the Karzai administration, which  barely a few weeks ago, was being pillored for running one of the most corrupt regimes . Tamim Ansary, an Afghan-born American writer, says there are formidable problems luring back the fighters into Afghan society. “First of all, what civil society? Second, who will administer the program? Karzai’s officials? Money is like DMSO to those guys. The moment it gets into their hands, it sinks into their palms. “

Looked at, in another way, the money may not still not be enough. The plan is to spend $500 million to drain 30,000 fighters from the insurgency over the next five years. That comes to about $17,000 per man or about $3,300 a year. ” Those men could make more than that from drug-thuggery and Talibanist protection rackets,” says Ansary.

Also that kind of money thins out rather quickly as it is distributed across southern Afghanistan. “What happens when some fighter joins the program, gets a bit of money and starts an auto repair shop, but his 25 first cousins don’t? Will they not tar the one guy who profited from the program as a traitor who took foreign money to betray his own,” he says.

That said, it may still be worth a try, given there aren’t many options, Ansary says .Half a billion dollars may sound like a lot to spend on an initiative that will probably achieve, at best, only a little. But compare that to the $30 billion it could cost to sustain an additional 30,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for one year.