The logs of war

I'm back in Kabul and working on travel stories from Herat for your enjoyment, but they may be postponed if the New York Times' coverage of the Wikileaks flood sucks me in for a full day of reading. I'll write soon, but for the moment, this story is really what you should be reading, anyway.

Herat: photos for the day

In campaign news, violence against candidates continues: an explosion injured 17 people. Actual Herat travel-blogging and campaign news to follow soon, I promise.

Off to Herat

I'm flying to Herat, former Silk Road nexus and pearl of ancient Khorasan, tomorrow morning. Updates could be sparse until Monday, when photos of the Friday Mosque, citadel, old city and assorted touristalia will liven up the political coverage.

Kidnapping candidates

Pajhwok News covers the kidnapping of a parliamentary candidate in Herat province. Arbab Yusuf was campaigning in Gulran district when he was abducted by the Taliban yesterday.

Running for office is a very different game here. Night letters demanding that candidates withdraw (often threatening violence against those who remain in the race) also menace would-be parliamentarians. Women are especially targeted, and the threats often extend to the candidates' families and children. A report from the Free and Fair Elections Foundation details the extent of this intimidation:

Attacks on individuals involved in the electoral process were reported by observers in Badghis, Farah, Helmand, Nangarhar, and Paktika during the challenge period. The attacks, several of them resulting in fatalities, included physical assaults, suicide attacks, and bombings directed at candidates and election workers.
Night letters were reported through direct and indirect observation in 9 provinces, with the general population, election workers, candidates, government employees and Afghan security forces designated as targets. In Zabul, government employees received threatening phone calls warning them not to participate in the electoral process.

When the risks of campaigning include violent death, it's almost natural that the rewards include kick-backs and bribes - salaries for the Wolesi Jirga (the lower house of Parliament and those currently running for election) just aren't high enough to justify running otherwise. It also affects candidates without ties to existing power-brokers disproportionately - for all the messy rounds of candidate vetting, even a perfect process could not eliminate everyone with questionable connections, so those afforded the security of warlord protection run with the additional advantages of armed support.

This certainly isn't the sole reason democracy struggles in Afghanistan, but insecurity is quite possibly the greatest current obstacle to good elections. If you're a praying sort, Arbab Yusuf - and his fellow candidates under siege - could probably use one right now.

Kabul Conference

(written in a 'net-less house yesterday, an account of the Kabul Conference as it appeared to residents of the city, rather than foreign diplomats).

The house today takes on the character of a hospital waiting room - the tense boredom permeating every thought, the paralysis of endless sitting, the vigil unknowing whether the patient will pull through, whether the security will hold. I remember this same toe-tapping quiet from four years ago, thoughts pacing over and over the wish that my mother's surgeon would walk through the door to tell he'd repaired her spine and that I could see her soon. Those worn prayers brought good news, and so today I return to habit, repeating a mantra of "let the conference end soon; let the city remain peaceful," with every helicopter passing overhead.

My roommate's Collected Stories of Richard Yates pass the time, as does forcing myself to make tomato sauce from scratch for a simple pasta lunch. By mid-afternoon, even the steady rhythm of washing my scarves feels like escape from the stifling nothingness in the shaded salon - and the prospect of another roommate's Lindsey Lohan DVD (the only thing at the corner shop not dubbed in Hindi) begins to seem more like entertainment than torment.

Finally, the periodic droning becomes a steady procession until one chopper passes so low the windows all rattle. Wishing the departing dignitaries their own safe travels, the knot in my solar plexus begins to unwind - it will be a quiet night.

(The New York Times suggests sightseeing the conference participants missed and details security procedures - including blocking pedestrian access - in the city.)

Afghanistan in black and white

One good thing about the security lockdown surrounding the Kabul Conference is that I have enforced quiet, punctuated only by the arrival of fresh iced coffees, in which to write. Expect a pileup of posts on Wednesday, as tomorrow all my usual haunts will be closed and I'll have to settle for chilled Nescafe in my own shaded-but-internet-free garden.

I've been reading good articles on Afghanistan in quantity of late, following current developments but also discovering older studies that just didn't fit into a busy academic schedule. For the moment, though, I'd like to express my annoyance with the Wall Street Journal, who this past week took an important story in Helmand Province and framed it very one-sidedly. The article's title, U.S. Rebuilds Power Plant, Taliban Reap a Windfall, demonstrates all the depth of analysis to appear in the article.

Believe me, there are plenty of stories to be written about the United States inadvertently supporting the opposition. I've noted before that logistics sub-contracting has created a self-sustaining protection racket, encouraging local leaders to manufacture instability along major roads and funnel bribes to the Taliban, for example. But building and maintaining power plants in provinces with insurgency is not as uniformly bad as the article, and subsequent blogs about it, appear.

The brief "on the other hand" pivot in the article acknowledges as much:

U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials acknowledge that the insurgents benefit from Kajaki's electricity. Yet, they say, winning over the South's population centers - Kandahar city and the Helmand provincial capital of Lashkar Gah - is the overwhelming priority, and providing them with more power for industries and homes furthers that aim.

"Electricity is changing people's lives. Whatever industry we have in Helmand is booming" since the Kajaki turbine was repaired in October, says Rory Donohoe, the U.S. Agency for International Development field program officer for Helmand.

Like most aspects of security and development work here, there are tradeoffs involved in the project - and exactly how they measure on the balance isn't necessarily clear. However, the author makes no attempt to do so. Reading between the lines of the next paragraph: "American civilian and military officials in Afghanistan have been arguing for months over whether further investment is warranted in Kajaki. Civilian officials point to the hydropower plant's sustainability and long-term potential, while military commanders are pressing to remedy the rolling blackouts that strike Kandahar and Lashkar Gah through a quick fix of installing diesel-fuelled generators in the two cities." It appears that the debate is over how best to extend electricity production, not whether to do so. If this many officials agree on one thing, I think the positives outweigh the negatives, at least in assessments by people on the ground.

Development projects often help both the population at large and insurgents living among them - part of the tricky nature of insurgency is its embeddedness among a much larger group of innocents. The fact that the Taliban are able to collect electricity fees is problematic, but it's not the entire story. Questions I've have liked to see answered: What are the estimates of the populations living in both areas? Is the Taliban able to take credit for providing this electricity, or do residents even in insurgent-held districts know that a Western development project powers their lights? How many jobs rely on the Kajaki plant? Is there any sign that electricity provision and development could reduce public dependence on Taliban governance in these districts? (okay, so the last question may be over-optimistic, but the point stands.)

"Counterinsurgency is complex" is a common trope, and "Afghanistan is complex" isn't a new statement even on this blog. Still, is it so hard to offer some balance in telling what seems to be on the whole a moderately successful development project with a notable downside?

Carpet diplomacy, or, a photo for the day

Yes, it's an Obama carpet, as found in a Bamiyan shop. Not quite a war rug, but almost as ridiculous.