A Failure To Protect

By Steve Hynd

Today, the UN issued a report saying that violence in Afghanistan is sharply up:

With an average of an assassination a day and a suicide bombing every second or third day, insurgents have greatly increased the level of violence in Afghanistan, and have become by far the biggest killers of civilians here, the United Nations said in a report released publicly on Saturday.

...The report also confirms statistics from the NATO coalition, which claimed a continuing decrease in civilian deaths caused by the United States military and its allies. At the same time it blames stepped-up military operations for an overall increase in the violence.

Meanwhile, NATO issued a statement indicating how proud it was that it only kills 30% of Afghan civilians nowadays. That NATO officers are missing the point (and showing a worrying lack of empathy to boot) is indicated by COIN advocate Spencer Ackerman's post today:

 the Taliban doesn�t need, from a strategic perspective, to win popular allegiance....It needs to stymie Gen. McChrystal�s forces from providing security to the Afghan population. If it does that, then it�s in a strong position, and right now, it�s doing that. McChrystal�s task isn�t just to reduce his own proportion of civilian casualties. He could do that, obviously, by not fighting at all. It�s to significantly arrest the violence that threatens civilians, full-stop.

But I don't think Spencer develops this thought far enough. Unlike the memory-impaired average Western observer, Afghans are immersed in this violence daily and they don't see any "re-set" just because Obama won an election in a far off land. Their occupation has lasted nine uninterrupted years and yet the occupier who claims to have their best interests at heart not only cannot stop the violence but is still killing significant numbers of their neighbours. I'm not an Afghan and I don't pretend to have any deep insight into Afghan thinking but I think that if that were me in that situation I'd be pissed and untrusting.

Look, when the U.S. took on the occupation of Afghanistan it took on the protection of the average Afghan. It only doubled down on that responsibility when it said it would pursue "population-centric counterinsurgency". By any Western measure, the US and its allies have failed in that responsibility to the Afghan people. Compare it with even the worst of Western insurgency fights, for instance the one that lasted decades in Northern Ireland. Just this week, we're hearing reports about the unlawfulness of the Bloody Sunday killings by British troops - but we're no longer discussing even the worst of attacks carried out by the I.R.A. during the same period. In America, we know that sometimes civilians get killed when the authorities protect the populace from the bad guys but it's nothing like 30%. It's so low that even a guy getting tazered unnecessarily can be frontpage news.

Maybe I'm being unrealistic in saying that kind of level of protection from their own "protectors" is what Afghans should rightfully expect and NATO should be ashamed of not attaining. After all, we're told we're at war in Afghanistan, right? And civilians get hurt in wars. Only no, it isn't, not any more. the US and its allies won the war. What's happening now is the post-war occupation. And it's nine years old.

Stuff like setting up "tribal" militias composed of smugglers and brigands doesn't help either:

as anti-Taliban militias have surfaced here in Nangarhar province and several other areas of the country, they have been accompanied by a wide array of troubles, from armed robbery to an alleged gang-rape.

Some experts and Afghan lawmakers believe a reliance on tribal militias to help combat an insurgency is the wrong approach, especially if governmental monitoring is scant or nonexistent.

"These militias are becoming their own sources of insecurity in the country," said Ahmad Nader Nadery, deputy chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. "They're not bound by any law and are not following any clear guidelines."

Just one of the many "who could have anticipated?" moments of the last almost-decade. But I bet anyone killed by these militias isn't counted in NATO's figures of the civilian deaths it causes, even though NATO policy is the proximate cause of those deaths. Does anyone believe Afghans can't connect those simple dots?

Today's BBC's report on the Oslo Forum, the annual conference at which mediators meet to discuss resolving various world hot-spots, quotes one attending diplomat saying of Afghanistan:

Everyone understands there is no military solution, but no-one understands what the non-military solution is.

Is it too out of order, too naive, to suggest that this is because everyone keeps saying there's a war in Afghanistan, when what it has become is an occupation engaged in pacification operations? The debate about whether the latter is a moral thing, a good thing for US national interests or even worth the blood and treasure expended is a very different one from the former. For one thing, it's generally recognised that when authorities cannot protect the populace in their charge or lose their empathy for that populace and begin seeing them as "things" rather than people, it's time to replace the authorities.