Panel says Nato has lost trust of Afghans

Gretchen Peters, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: September 16. 2009 12:05AM UAE / September 15. 2009 8:05PM GMT

SYDNEY // The Nato-led coalition fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan is not being out-fought but out-governed, according to rule of law and counterinsurgency experts who gathered here for a conference on bringing stability to the war-torn Central Asian state.

“We have to remember that we are in a popularity contest,” said Whit Mason, a former UN official in Afghanistan and an organiser of the September conference, held at the University of New South Wales.

Panellists, who spoke on a range of issues from the opium trade to corruption and the immense difficulty of trying to implement good governance in a country that has undergone three decades of non-stop fighting, noted that the Taliban in some rural areas have proven far more effective at governing than the western-backed regime of President Hamid Karzai.

District-level shadow governments run by the Taliban collect tax from farmers and shopkeepers, maintain a degree of public security and run a court system that is rudimentary but widely seen as fair and far less corrupt than the state version. The Taliban system may be based on fear and intimidation, but in many parts of the south, where corrupt warlords and police have also victimised local populations, the Taliban have come to be seen by many locals as the lesser of two evils, in particular since Taliban commanders are known to punish their own fighters in cases where they determine members of the public have been mistreated.

“We are facing a crisis of legitimacy at the local level,” said David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert and an adviser to the Nato commander in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal. “Local populations in any insurgency are in a lethally uncertain environment. In these environments, support follows strength, not the other way around.”

Gen McChrystal, who has been given the job by US President Barack Obama of implementing a revitalised strategy for the war in Afghanistan, recently reported to Washington that the Taliban insurgency was stronger than previously realised. The US administration initially narrowly defined its goal as defeating al Qa’eda and other extremist groups and denying them sanctuary. Increasingly senior US and Nato military officials have concluded that reaching that goal will require a sweeping counterinsurgency campaign aimed at protecting the Afghan population, establishing good governance and rebuilding the economy.

“This is very easy to say,” said Mr Kilcullen. “But it is really hard to do.”

With public support for the war in Afghanistan dwindling in many Nato nations, including the US, there is decreasing appetite for a campaign that many experts predict will be bloody, drawn-out and expensive.

Panellists in Sydney agreed that exacerbating the problem was the history of poor co-ordination between the members of the Nato alliance and the lack of a clearly defined exit strategy for the growing number of western troops deployed there.

Participants at the conference agreed that the August 20 presidential elections, which were widely seen to be marred by ballot box stuffing and phantom voters, had left Afghanistan at a critical tipping point. More than three weeks since Afghans went to the polls, there is still no declared winner and votes from dozens of polling stations remain quarantined for suspected fraud.

The latest partial results have Mr Karzai with 54 per cent of the vote and the leading challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, trailing with 28 per cent.

The numbers put Mr Karzai on the path to outright victory – unless the votes eliminated over fraud complaints pull him back down below the 50 per cent threshold requiring a two-man runoff.

The panellists, some of whom had observed the electoral process on the ground, said evidence of vote rigging was impossible to ignore.

“There appears to have been industrial scale fraud,” said William Maley, an Australian professor and the author on several books about Afghanistan. He described the vote as “a massive triumph of political power over rule of law”.

Francesc Vendrell, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School who served as the EU special representative to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2008 concurred, adding that: “Unless we come out firmly against this, we will have very little leg to stand on with the Afghans and ... no way to promote the rule of law in Afghanistan.”

Yet the possibility that rejecting the vote results could spark further violence also troubled panelists.

“We have to distinguish between what is ideal and what is possible,” said Astri Suhrke, a Norwegian political scientist.

Some described the situation in Afghanistan as beyond repair, and suggested it may be too late to be holding conferences about state-building and establishing rule of law.

“I feel like we are standing on the bridge of the Titanic, with the water rising,” said Graeme Smith, a reporter from Canada’s Globe and Mail. “And we are sitting here discussing how icebergs form.”



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