The Times It is no wonder that women’s rights groups, civil society and half-decent human beings are concerned that negotiating with the Taleban could undo what precious little progress has been made to improve people’s rights in Afghanistan. When they ruled here until 2001, the Taleban doled out justice in football grounds so that as many people as possible could see. Today, they are forced to use more modest premises — the forecourt of a mud-brick mosque, a street corner or a village square. Crimes committed in the name of Islam while the Taleban were in power are still committed in parts of the country where hardline militants hold sway. Any political accommodation, civil rights groups fear, would bring an end to a role for women in public life, an end to the quota for women MPs and the start of a slide back to much darker days, when women were forbidden from leaving their homes without a male relative to escort them. Unfortunately, the Taleban are not the only savages who condone such brutal behaviour. Even the country’s President, who rarely shows his own wife in public, wonders whether human rights should be sacrificed to bring an end to the bloodshed. It was President Karzai who signed a law last year that in effect let men rape their wives, or starve them. What, we should ask, have our all our soldiers been dying for? Nine years into the war, women seek ever more desperate measures to escape (in Herat’s burns hospital, victims of self-immolation often take weeks to die), yet many conservative Afghans hold views of women’s rights and sexual morality that are worlds away from the ideals enshrined in international law. Negotiations or not, women will have to continue fighting for a better lot in Afghanistan for many years to come. If we achieve anything in this country, we must be sure never to betray the idealists, the activists and the civil society campaigners who have risked their lives to try to make Afghanistan more tolerant. Fortunately, all of the women’s activists I have met seem more than determined continue their work.
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
A widow is whipped to within an inch of her life and then killed with an AK47. A runaway wife is held down so her husband can slice off her nose. Teenage lovers are captured and killed by firing squad. Women are stoned to death in football stadiums — all in the name of the Taleban.
The Times Winston Churchill knew the perils of Afghanistan’s snipers more than a century ago. Today, it seems, the Taleban sharpshooters are just as deadly. In his account of 1898 of a British excursion into the borderlands between what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, he quoted Kipling’s Arithmetic on the Frontier: “A scrimmage in a Border Station/ A canter down some dark defile/ Two thousand pounds of education/ Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.” Churchill’s report refers to the snipers as armed with long-barrelled, elaborately inlaid, jezails or muskets. Their fire was accurate and intense. “These sharpshooters enjoyed themselves immensely,” he wrote. The fatal shootings of two British soldiers in Helmand have renewed fears over Taleban snipers. In February General James Conway, the Commandant of the US Marines, told Congress that the biggest threat was not necessarily the improvised explosive device. “It is the sniper that takes a long-range shot and can penetrate our protective equipment.” In 2006, when British soldiers were first sent to Helmand, they would mock the Taleban insurgents’ “spray and pray” technique. Nonetheless, in the early years of the conflict, liberal rules of engagement meant that US and Nato soldiers could respond with 1,000lb bombs dropped on the insurgents’ firing positions. By 2008 the Taleban, obliterated in battle against a better trained, more disciplined and technologically superior enemy, had switched to home-made bombs. Face-to-face contact became rare. But as Nato’s rules of engagement were tightened to reduce civilian casualties the Taleban tactics evolved. By last month the coalition military officials admitted that there had been an alarming rise of “pinpointed” attacks and “small sniping incidents”. The Taleban, meanwhile, said that they had trained more fighters to use the Russian-made Dragunov rifles. When a US sentry was shot in the head last week, his commanding officer blamed specialists trained overseas. “What country they are from I couldn’t tell you. But the skill of the enemy fighter that took down my soldier is not something that was trained here,” Lieutenant-Colonel David Flynn said. The bullet is thought to have been fired from at least 400 metres — well beyond the accurate range of an AK47. Both sides use sharpshooters to sap enemy morale and Nato is fighting back. “I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have people who hunt snipers and kill them,” Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Breasseale, the Isaf spokesman, said. Kipling’s poem reaches a bleak conclusion. Training, wealth and technology are no match for valley scamps “blessed with perfect sight”. “No proposition Euclid wrote/ No formulae the text-books know/ Will turn the bullet from your coat/ Or ward the tulwar’s downward blow/ Strike hard who cares – shoot straight who can/ The odds are on the cheaper man.”
Jerome Starkey
The Times
Jerome Starkey
The real test of success or failure in Afghanistan is what we leave behind. Today it is a country riven by a civil war and led by a Government (hardly worthy of the name) propped up by Nato’s blood and treasure.
By 2014 those props will have gone and unless President Karzai tries to change the constitution, the country he will have led for 13 years will attempt the first democratic transition of power in its history. If that works Nato can claim a sort of victory.
It looks unlikely.
For all the night raids and rhetoric, airstrikes and “reassurance patrols” over the past ten years, Nato and the international community have failed to address the root causes of the conflict. The Taleban see themselves as the rightful rulers of Afghanistan. Many rely on support from Pakistan, which still seems to be forthcoming.
President Karzai’s government is corrupt and predatory and the country is awash with guns. Warlords who should have been tried for human rights abuses have been given jobs as governors and ministers. The Northern Alliance, which helped America to invade in 2001, are afraid they will be sidelined if Mr Karzai makes peace with his fellow ethnic Pashtuns in the Taleban.
Afghanistan needs a political solution. It needs a government which serves instead of steals; it needs a peace deal with the Taleban (otherwise any election is impossible) and it needs a deal that appeals to the Tajiks, Hazaras and other ethnic groups. After ten years focused on fighting instead of talking it is hard to see how Nato will get it right now when they are racing for the exit.