Where's The Progress, General Petraeus?

By Steve Hynd

An important article by the New York Times' Rod Nordland puts a massive dent in the Saintly General's PR campaign to suggest, without evidence, that there's any kind of progress in Afghanistan.

Unarmed government employees can no longer travel safely in 30 percent of the country�s 368 districts, according to published United Nations estimates, and there are districts deemed too dangerous to visit in all but one of the country�s 34 provinces.

The number of insurgent attacks has increased significantly; in August 2009, insurgents carried out 630 attacks. This August, they initiated at least 1,353, according to the Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office, an independent organization financed by Western governments and agencies to monitor safety for aid workers.

...The Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office says that by almost every metric it has, Afghanistan is more dangerous now than at any time since 2001.

The most recent troop buildup comes in response to steady advances by the Taliban. Four years ago, the insurgents were active in only four provinces. Now they are active in 33 of 34, the organizations say.

�We do not support the perspective that this constitutes �things getting worse before they get better,� � said Nic Lee, director of the Afghan N.G.O. Safety Office, �but rather see it as being consistent with the five-year trend of things just getting worse.�

And there's a very illuminating paragraph that goes:

The International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, does not routinely release detailed data on attacks around the country, and the Afghan government stopped doing so in mid-2009. United Nations officials have also stopped releasing details of attacks, though they monitor them closely. Requests for access to that information were denied.

Oh I wonder why? If things were showing progress, wouldn't they want to cry such data from the rooftops?

Meanwhile, NATO has finally admitted - after ten days - that 10 civilians may have been killed and an electoral candidate wounded in an airstrike on a convoy that NATO says also killed a wanted terrorist. A ratio of ten innocent to one terrorist may be acceptable to NATO, but I doubt it's acceptable to their relatives. A NATO official told Reuters "The question remains why an election official or candidate was travelling with a known terrorist," as if NATO doesn't already know all about the tangled nature of Afghan politics and civic life - where the police chief might attack Taliban militants by day and sit down with them for dinner by night.

Talking of that tangle, we keep being told that Afghan government corruption fuels the insurgency. Who fuelled that corruption? We did, of course - the West, at taxpayer's expense.

And if that corruption is widespread because folk like the CIA thought it would give them handles to steer Afghan elite leaders - and if we believe that Western contractors are also involved in deep corruption and that Western officials are not immune to the temptation to feather their own nests meanwhile - are we at all surprised to learn that ordinary soldiers figure they should get some of the pie?

Military police are investigating claims that British soldiers may have trafficked heroin from Afghanistan.

The Ministry of Defence said they were aware of "unsubstantiated" claims that troops were using military aircraft to ship the drug out of the country.

The inquiry is focusing on service personnel at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.

No wonder the Russian ambassador to Kabul is joining the NGOs cited in the NY Times piece to say that Petraeus "gut feelings" about progress are badly mistaken.