Dispatches from Afghanistan and Pakistan 2011 #4

by Michael Skinner

Thursday, 10 March

I departed Kabul today and arrived uneventfully in Islamabad Pakistan. Now that I am out of Afghanistan, I can safely give my thanks and acknowledge my great debt to Eng. Sayed Jawed of HAFO for his generous hospitality and to all the HAFO staff who were so helpful during my stay in Kabul. I am looking forward to working with Sayed and the HAFO staff, the staff at AREU, and other Afghan organizations to make the dialogue on Afghanistan a success this summer.

If I am to summarize my impressions of Kabul and Afghanistan in 2011 in comparison to my impressions in 2007, I have to be honest that I spent too little time, listened to too few Afghans, and my travel was far too restricted to make a fair comparison. Nonetheless, I have to conclude from my limited observations in Kabul where conditions are the best of anywhere in Afghanistan, most conditions for Afghans seem to be deteriorating. Despite the rosy reports of Canadian government officials, the rhetoric emanating from Ottawa does not really reflect the reality on the ground in Kabul.

Afghanistan: "informal settlement" of war refugees.

The few Afghans I was able to talk to distrust Western interests more today than in 2007. They recognize that the Western states have not only failed to fulfill our principled promises of establishing freedom, human rights, women’s rights, and democracy, but that these liberal ideals have been eliminated from the realist agenda outlined by President Obama’s White Paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

When I returned to Canada, in 2007, I had a hard time convincing people that the war in Afghanistan had spilled over into Pakistan with regular covert Special Forces raids and drone attacks. Since the Obama administration ramped up the covert war in Pakistan the fact this is a war without borders is more evident. The Obama administration’s renaming of the Global War on Terror as Overseas Contingency Operations symbolises the contingent and escalating nature of this global war, which is taking place not only overtly in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also covertly on battlefronts in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Philippines, the Middle East, and throughout Latin America, and Africa. If you don’t believe me, look at the U.S. Congress war appropriations documents.

Afghans debate whether the imposition of liberal ideals without Afghan consent was either appropriate or possible; regardless, it is clear these ideals have not been achieved and will not be achieved via warfare. Nonetheless, the hard facts of the geopolitical and economic interests underlying the occupation of Afghanistan are increasingly evident. The U.S. and its closest allies in an emerging Empire of Capital have gained and can conceivably hold and expand upon an important strategic bridgehead in the center of Eurasia. Moreover, investors are poised to make huge profits by developing the transportation, communications, and energy transmission networks across Afghanistan to reconnect Eurasia via a new Silk Road network. Moreover, exploiting Afghanistan’s wealth of natural resources presents great opportunities for both profit and geopolitical advantage. Regardless of whether the security situation improves or chaos ensues, investors in the integrated Western military industrial complex are already winners.

The war in Afghanistan has failed to liberate Afghans (it has especially failed to liberate Afghan women) and has failed to secure either ordinary Afghans or the people of the world from terrorism. Nevertheless, the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other Overseas Contingency Operations are successfully liberating capital and securing the interests of investors. Even if in the worst case scenario, chaos engulfs Greater Central Asia, the U.S. with the support of its closest allies can maintain its position – the superior position Zbigniew Brzesinski describes as global primacy. If not by remaining atop the current inequitable, but nevertheless, mutual gains system of globalizing liberal markets, at the very least, the U.S. can stay on top by losing less than any other state in the relative gains system of war.

Western leaders are promising to withdraw Western combat forces from Afghanistan in order to appease domestic political pressures within the Western states. Yet, it is clear from the expensive building projects still taking place on OEF and NATO air bases throughout Afghanistan that American forces are here to stay in fortified garrisons like those that have remained in the Philippines and Cuba since the 19th century and those established around the world since WWII.

So in short, upon leaving Afghanistan, things have gotten worse and are likely to continue getting worse before they get better.

Arriving at the Islamabad airport, I’m very happy to greet my good friend Arshad Khan. He takes me directly to his home where I meet his family and then out for dinner at Kabul House an Afghan restaurant. I was expecting to try Pakistani fare for dinner, but I’m not yet tired of Afghan food either and the restaurant proved to be a good choice.

Some Afghan refugees who came to Pakistan with some resources have become quite successful, such as the owner of this restaurant. However, many, like the dozen families camping in a vacant lot a few hundred metres from Arshad’s home are destitute. These Afghan refugees living on the margins of human existence sift through the garbage in Arshad’s neighbourhood, beg, and do whatever informal labour might be available.

I thought I was staying at Arshad’s modest home while in Islamabad, but because his mother is visiting from their hometown and the house is full of family, Arshad has arranged for me to stay nearby at a friend’s home.

When we arrive where I will be staying, I am shocked by the grandeur of the immense entranceway topped by a large stuffed mountain-goat head – this place is a mansion. The power is out, due to the regularly scheduled rotating blackouts that were instituted here several years ago to deal with a chronic and worsening energy shortage. In the candlelight I cannot see the end of the cavernous living room into which I am led by an elderly Pashtun man with a long white beard and an infectious smile. I sit on one of many couches in the huge room beside another stuffed mountain-goat.

My host Ajad invites me to have tea served by the elderly man who Ajad calls Mama. Arshad explains mama means maternal uncle, but Arjad tells me the man is a servant who resides in the house with his wife who cooks. Ajad’s extended family of fifteen people lives in this house, but all are currently living in another house in Karachi, so I will be here by myself.

When the lights finally do come on, I see that I am seated in an immense greeting hall with marble floor and fireplace. On the wall behind me are photographs of the deceased family patriarch the grandfather of my host and the original owner of this palatial house, Sardar Sakhi Jan Sher-e-Kashmir. He was a Member of the National Assembly. In one photo he is shaking hands with George Bush Sr. in the White House in 1989; in another he meets Bush along with Benazir Bhutto. I was not expecting to be accommodated in a home of the Pakistani establishment, but then my friend Arshad is always full of surprises.


Friday, 11 March

News from Afghanistan is that American led OEF/ISAF forces in Kanadahar have killed President Karzai’s 63 year-old cousin Yar Muhammad Karzai, in his home during a night-raid. Details are sketchy and it is unclear whether Canadian Forces are involved. I expect Karzai will be leading Afghans in intensifying further displays of outrage against civilian casualties caused by OEF/ISAF forces.

I will have a busy day today with two scheduled speaking engagements. I have a pleasant breakfast of chai, a spicy egg omelette, and fried pratha bread – it is delicious and substantial.

In daylight, the decay of the mansion is apparent. Everything is frayed around the edges and in need of maintenance and a thorough cleaning. Like Islamabad, the mansion, probably built in the late 1960s or 1970s, symbolises a more promising time that was unsustainable. Islamabad, built in the 1960s and 1970s according to the plan of a Greek architect, and financed by an international community that has controlled Pakistan by the purse strings ever since, is also frayed around the edges and in need of maintenance and a thorough cleaning.

Pakistanis live in a constant state of military alert. They are fearful of war with India and fearful of terrorist attacks from any number of insurgent and criminal organizations. I learn my host recently survived being hit by five bullets while his father survived seventeen bullets fired by opponents in a bitter land dispute. The material and psychological costs of maintaining the Pakistani security state are amply evident. Police road blocks, security checkpoints, and soldiers with automatic weapons hiding behind sandbagged bunkers are everywhere.

I had not known before arriving that Islamabad was a planned city, designed in 1960 by a Greek architect, to serve as a new national capital. Arshad promises me that behind its sterile facade and logical grid of streets it is, nevertheless, a vibrant city. The logical street grid is welcome as we travel to my first speaking engagement during a rush hour that is not bad at all, particularly compared with the gridlock of a New Delhi rush hour. Drivers seem just as crazy here, however. Traffic lane markings are apparently no more than suggestions – drivers pass one another five or more abreast on a road marked with three lanes while motorbikes randomly weave through the traffic.

The Quaid-e Azam University campus, where I am speaking to faculty and researchers at the National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, sprawls across many acres at the foot of the Margalla Hills – a range of low but rugged mountains that form the northwest border of Islamabad.

I am invited to share tea with the institute director, Prof. Khurram Qadir. Prof. Qadir projects the image of the quintessential sophisticated intellectual and his conversation during our chat in his office and his probing questions after my talk demonstrate his image is backed by substantive thought.

The talk goes exceptionally well with an extremely engaged and knowledgeable audience. One professor in particular, Dr. Naseem Ahmed, is so eloquent and insightful in his condemnation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that I tell him I wish I could bring him with me back to Canada to make the same powerful rebuke against Canadian foreign policy to the Canadian Prime Minister.

After the talk, one of the institute research fellows, Akhtar Rassol Dodla takes us to lunch in the huts. These are a row of restaurants serving inexpensive traditional Pakistani food housed in squat ramshackle huts along the edge of campus. Arshad wants me to try a university specialty called crisis. He tells me the origins of the name. When the hut operators would run out of food late in the evening when many of the students wanted to eat, the students declared the late night food shortage was a crisis. One enterprising cook made a spicy omelette out of whatever leftovers he could scrape together and the omelette has been called crisis ever since.

Arshad, Akhtar, and I spend the afternoon drinking tea, while we sit outdoors discussing various issues with a number of faculty members and students who come and go from our table throughout the afternoon.

The next talk at Iqra University goes just as well. This talk is attended primarily by graduate students from the faculties of International Relations Studies and International Development Studies. The discussion with these well informed students is just as intense as with the professors and researchers at Quaid-e Azam this morning.

During discussions both this morning and evening, these Pakistani professors, researchers, and graduate students have clearly argued they see no justifiable reason why Western militaries should be fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. They do, however, recognise the rational geopolitical and economic interests motivating the occupation that I have outlined in my talk. I am struck with the realisation that these interests, which are invisible in the West, are taken for granted here in Pakistan. Consequently, these interests remain largely un-theorised in both Canada as well as Pakistan.

On the one hand, in Canada, the lack of theorisation is due first to ignorance, but more pernicious is the fear of academic sanction. I have been called a conspiracy theorist, a traitor, and a mouthpiece of the Taliban when talking about my own research, even though the answers to my research questions are found primarily in American and Canadian government documentation as well as the works of influential American and Canadian geopolitical theorists such as Zbigniniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Michael Ignatieff. I frankly don’t care about this kind of un-academic name-calling, but I understand why other academics choose to avoid it by pursuing less controversial research questions. Moreover, no agency wants to fund such research – somehow I have fallen through the cracks a few times such as my recent sponsorship initiated by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies to come to India. Pursuing the critical questions I do is not a lucrative academic endeavour.

On the other hand, Pakistanis are so familiar with these geopolitical and economic interests that these issues are taken for granted as mundane; thus they are not sufficiently theorised. My Pakistani counterparts here are quite right to say as they do “of course the international intervention is about the pursuit of geopolitical and economic interests – few of us ever believed the U.S. coalition attacked Afghanistan to liberate women or make Afghans good liberal democrats.” Nevertheless, thorough analyses at a deeper level than mere recognition and description are necessary.

I don’t accept the argument of several students who argued this evening that the intervention of Western forces in Pakistan is unnecessary, because Pakistani security forces have the various insurgencies under control – this is not true. Pakistani authorities may be able to a certain extent to contain insurgents and limit the frequency and scale of terror attacks and military assaults; however, the insurgents are not under control. The Pakistani government will have to negotiate with the various insurgent groups if there is to be an end to these conflicts, some of which, like the Baloch independence movement, have been festering since the original partition of India and Pakistan.

What is clear, at least among these members of the Pakistani intelligentsia, is that Pakistanis are frustrated and angry with the West and especially the U.S. and Canada.

On one level of analysis, one of my interlocutors points out that Pakistanis have suffered far more than any Western state in terms of military and civilian casualties as a result of the War on Terror now known as Overseas Contingency Operations. Pakistani civilian casualties were higher in this past year than Afghan casualties; many of these were the result of U.S. drone attacks and other OEF covert attacks mounted from Afghanistan. Pakistan has also accepted hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees. In return for Pakistani sacrifices, Canada has increasingly closed immigration to most Pakistanis and only a few weeks ago tightened restrictions on family sponsorships.

At the geopolitical and economic levels of analysis, I did not need to convince my Pakistani interlocutors that the U.S. and its closest allies including Canada have strategic interests in this region. The continuity of the Great Game is a thesis already very familiar with Pakistanis, even as many Canadians remain ignorant of the historical context and current conjuncture of events in this part of the world. The thrust of first British imperialism into India beginning in 1600, and the continuity of Anglo imperialism taken up first as American meddling in Indian, Pakistani, and Afghan affairs following WWII, erupted in the American proxy war against the USSR that began in Afghanistan in 1979.

Geopolitical and economic interests evolve as various contingencies arise; thus, constantly updated analyses are required. Nonetheless, there is one primary objective common to the British and American empires, and I argue in the contemporary conjuncture, using Ellen Wood’s thesis, common to the emerging American led Empire of Capital. Since Elizabeth I granted the East India Company its royal charter in 1600, the expansion of liberal trade, and more broadly, in Marxist theoretical terminology, the expansion of capitalist social relations has been and continues to be the overarching primary objective of these three successive liberal capitalist empires. Aside from the significant transformation of Britain from a mercantilist to a capitalist empire, what has changed constantly, since 1600, are the nature and composition of the other imperial oppositions, and indigenous resistance movements. The Mughal, Chinese, Persian, Russian, and finally Soviet empires all collapsed due to domestic fractures as well as the external pressures exerted by Britain and the United States. However, popular resistance movements of various progressive and regressive stripes are growing.

What is unique today in this Great Game is that currently there is only one empire in existence – an American empire that is transforming itself into an American dominated Empire of Capital. Consequently, rather than needing to use Afghanistan as a barrier state between the rival British, Russian, and Persian empires as it was used during the long 19th century (1789-1914), or between the American and Soviet empires during the Cold War, Afghanistan is now perceived by American strategists as, in the terms of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a “bridgehead” to expand capitalist social relations across Eurasia.

I have just finished reading Muhammad Farooq’s “‘Objectification’ of Islam: A Study of Pakistani Madrassah Texts” in which he compares the Islamic teachings in the madrassahs prior to the British empire, during the British empire, during the Cold War, and since 9/11. At the risk of oversimplifying his argument he describes the gradual growth of a reactionary movement in Islamic teachings. During the medieval era, the madrassah texts epitomised rational sciences and progress providing one of the roots of liberal secular thought and modern science. Farooq tracks a decline of rational science in Islamic teaching and a growing resistance to Western civilization evident throughout the 19th century in reaction to the British empire. He concludes: “After independence [1947], being entangled in the web of Western culture and (sic) modern state system, the ulama [Islamic teachers] started a new struggle to become the guardians of morals and culture.” But it was during the Afghan jihad initiated in the 1980s by the U.S. CIA with the assistance of the Pakistani ISI that the ulama initiated the most vehemently regressive anti-Western teachings. These regressive teachings, which Western strategists initially inspired, are now cited as the root of international terrorism and one of the reasons why the West must now wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

I am unaware whether any Western analysts have tracked the regressive movement in fundamentalist Christian teachings, since the early 1980s, which parallel the regressive movement of fundamentalist Islamic teachings. The overtly political nature of both Islamic and Christian fundamentalist teachings motivates the warriors on both sides, while obscuring the material roots of the conflict. This is a conflict rooted in the imperial expansion of first Britain as it transformed from a mercantilist to a state-centred capitalist empire and since the end of WWII the imperial expansion of America as it currently transforms from a state-centred capitalist empire into a state-dominated Empire of Capital.


Saturday, 12 March

The news from Kabul today is that President Hamid Karzai has demanded that OEF and ISAF forces immediately cease combat operations. I don’t want to play a game of I told you so, but I have argued with Canadian government and NATO officials, since 2007, that Karzai would eventually take this stand. I suspect there will be scant coverage of Karzai’s remarks in Western media, but this is important news here. Karzai made the demand during a memorial service for the 74 civilian victims of a recent OEF/ISAF operation and the murder of his cousin Yar Muhammad Karzai in his home during a night-raid by OEF/ISAF forces.

I suspect proponents of the war will argue Karzai is mentally unstable and unfit to continue leading Afghanistan in much the same way these arguments were made against President Aristede of Haiti before Canadian, American, and French forces either abducted him or escorted him to safety depending on whose account you choose to believe. A movement by Western strategists to remove Karzai from power has been in place for some time and is likely to be ramped up now.

Karzai’s demand for the cessation of combat operations has certainly opened another fracture in the argument of Canadian hawks that Afghans want Canadians to be fighting alongside the Americans in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This evening I speak at a public forum at an interesting cultural centre called Kuch Khaas, which according to its website “provides community space for public discourse, the pursuit of knowledge, meaningful entertainment, civic engagement and advocacy.”

Most people in the audience impress me as being affluent, well-educated, and generally liberal in perspective. While most have undoubtedly been angered by the war in Afghanistan and its spill over into Pakistan, I sense that few have rationally theorised why the war is occurring or where current trends may be heading. After my talk, many people are visibly devastated. I have to reassure my audience that further escalation of Overseas Contingency Operations, which could have horrific consequences for Pakistanis, is not inevitable. Provided enough people around the world, but particularly in North America and Europe do everything they can to reverse the current trend toward increased global warfare, another world is possible. As I have heard Noam Chomsky state (although I cannot remember his exact words), the world changes only when determined groups of people make change happen.