In a news article, the New York Times reports that basically the whole damn war in Afghanistan has been classified. Not their precise words.
The United States has spent about $65 billion to build Afghanistan’s army and police forces, and until this month the American-led coalition regularly shared details on how the money was being put to use and on the Afghan forces’ progress.
But as of this month, ask a question as seemingly straightforward as the number of Afghan soldiers and police officers in uniform, and the military coalition offers a singularly unrevealing answer: The information is now considered classified.
The American outlay for weapons and gear for Afghan forces? Classified. The cost of teaching Afghan soldiers to read and write? Even that is now a secret.
U.S. Suddenly Goes Quiet on Effort to Bolster Afghan Forces, New York Times
This comes from the latest Special Inspector General quarterly report on reconstruction, which would want to report basic statistics on how the reconstruction is going, but can't.
Last quarter, ISAF classified the executive summary of a report that SIGAR had used as a primary source of information on ANSF capability. This quarter, the new Resolute Support Mission went further, classifying information SIGAR has, until now, used to publicly report on, among other matters, ANSF strength, attrition, equipment, personnel sustainment, infrastructure, and training, as well as Afghan Air Force and Special Mission Wing capabilities, and anticorruption initiatives at the Ministry of Defense (MOD) and Ministry of Interior (MOI).
Quarterly Report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
In an opinion piece, the
New York Times objects that basically the whole damn war in Afghanistan has been classified. Not their precise words either. But close enough.
The threats that Afghan and American troops face in Afghanistan remain all too real. But it strains credulity to believe that insurgents would become more proficient fighters by poring over lengthy inspector general reports about an increasingly forgotten war. Classifying that information unreasonably prevents American taxpayers from drawing informed conclusions about the returns on a $107.5 billion reconstruction investment that, adjusted for inflation, has surpassed the price tag of the Marshall Plan.
Inconvenient Truths in Afghanistan, New York Times
Secrecy News objects to making basically the whole damn war secret, and rolls its eyes at the absurdity of the justification given, too.
The General did not explain how budget and contracting information, among other routine data, could be used to sharpen attacks against allied forces.
DoD Classifies Data on Afghanistan Oversight, Federation of American Scientists
Human Rights Watch reports on the widespread intimidation of journalists in Afghanistan. The intimidation comes from many sides.
Afghan journalists told Human Rights Watch that freedom of the press may be in a “downward spiral,” with increasing intimidation and violence from both state and non-state actors, lack of government protection, and waning international support. Most important, the government’s failure to uphold press freedom and to adequately investigate and prosecute threats and attacks against media workers has, they fear, emboldened those who wish to silence them.
Afghan journalists face threats from all sides: government officials exploiting weak legal protections to intimidate reporters and editors to compel them not to cover controversial topics; the Taliban and other insurgent groups using threats and violence to compel reporting they consider favorable; and police and justice officials letting threats, assaults, and even murders go uninvestigated and unprosecuted. Most of the threats come from individuals acting on behalf of powerful government officials or influential local actors, including militia leaders and so-called warlords.
“Stop Reporting or We’ll Kill Your Family”: Threats to Media Freedom in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch
The violence and threats of violence result in media self-censorship.
Violence, impunity, and lack of legal and institutional safeguards for the media have fueled fear, self-censorship, and attrition among Afghanistan’s media professionals. Journalists told Human Rights Watch that they do not attempt to cover issues that pose too great a risk to their security. Issues like corruption, drug-trafficking, and land-grabbing frequently implicate powerful political figures who operate within or outside the government and who have exacted reprisals against the media for unfavorable reporting. A senior newspaper editor told Human Rights Watch:
We see our job as needing to pressure the government to reform. Some issues we are careful about. We could criticize President Karzai, yes. But [Marshall] Fahim, no.122 Or people in his camp. We censor ourselves for the security of our staff. These people don’t file a complaint—they might kill us.
“Stop Reporting or We’ll Kill Your Family”: Threats to Media Freedom in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch
Afghanistan Analysts Network has an interesting look at the college exam process.
Exam prep classes are becoming important.
The number of such courses has starkly increased across the country over the past years. In Kabul alone, hundreds are offered, with tens of thousands of students from grade eleven onwards registered. They are run by – more or less – qualified teachers and university students. A student ideally starts his course two years ahead of the kankur exam.
Battleground Kankur: Afghan students’ difficult way into higher education, Afghanistan Analysts Network
Students from rural areas have obstacles in just taking the exam.
As the kankur mainly takes place in the capital of a province, students from rural areas are often at a disadvantage. They have to raise money for the journey as well as for food and accommodation, while costs for the latter often rise significantly in cities during kankur times. In Ghazni province, for example, as this author has learned, the price for one night’s accommodation tripled this year. Speaking to AAN, Reza Haidari, a kankur applicant from rural Ghazni said it was hard to “find a warm bed” in Ghazni city during exam times. He himself paid 400 afghanis (eight dollars) per night for a hotel room shared with ten other students.
Battleground Kankur: Afghan students’ difficult way into higher education, Afghanistan Analysts Network
Local strongmen show up in the university exam process. Controlling exam access, taking bribes about that, disputing whether the exam time is ended and students must put down their pencils, at gunpoint, and such.
Incidents like these must be understood as exhibitions of power. In many poor, post-conflict countries, studying brings pride to families and is a potential means for future success and wealth. Securing a place in university for someone in their community helps increase a local strongman’s standing.
Battleground Kankur: Afghan students’ difficult way into higher education, Afghanistan Analysts Network
This might be underreported. If journalists reported that exam proctors are being beaten up by gunmen, they might be beaten up by gunmen.
Sarah Chayes has a new book about corruption. She talks about the humiliation that goes with.
After the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan lacked a well-organized, national police force, Chayes explains. That's when corruption began to flourish. “Local governors basically had their own militias,” she says.
Then, over time, the system crystallized. She says ordinary Afghans had to fork over money for everything from driving past a police checkpoint to obtaining a death certificate for “a father who was blown up in a suicide bombing.”
“The extortion was perpetrated in a way that was just incredibly humiliating and offensive to people,” Chayes says. “I could watch people getting more and more indignant.”
The corruption was helping drive local Afghans to join the Taliban. The US was seen as the patron of a corrupt Afghan government. “People would become less resistant to Taliban inroads,” explains Chayes.
Here is why government corruption can spawn religious extremism around the globe, PRI
And she stresses a theme of security needs driving corruption, but then corruption driving insecurity.
[E]ven sympathetic Western officials have it backward, she says: They think, “First let’s establish security, then we can worry about governance.” What if corruption is causing insecurity?
Do corrupt governments breed political violence?, Washington Post
And my argument, quite simply, is so long people as people are being abused every day by their government, they will be joining the Taliban or joining Boko Haram every day. And so if you ignore those - those factors, what you'll be doing is essentially mowing the grass, but the grass keeps growing. And so in the end, it's a really self-defeating way of ordering priorities. And I'm not trying to say that corruption is the one driver of, you know, revolutions and violent extremism around the world. Of course, it's intersecting with other risk factors and things like that. But I feel as though this linkage between corruption and acute global security crises, people are missing it.
'Thieves Of State' Reveals Tremendous Power Of Global Corruption, NPR
The average GDP per capita in Afghanistan is about $425 per year. And when Special Inspector General John Sopko goes to Afghanistan to fight corruption there, he might charter a plane.
Special Inspector General John F. Sopko completes inaugural tour of SIGAR facilities in Afghanistan, meets top U.S. and Coalition officials.
If the Special Inspector General wanted to talk to some corrupt person in Afghanistan, he would actually talk to his interpreter. And his interpreter would talk to the corrupt person. And the corrupt person would talk back to the interpreter. And the interpreter would talk to the Special Inspector General.
That is, a Special Inspector General investigating corruption needs a fixer.
The predicament is familiar: the foreign interloper, whether a journalist, a general, or a colonial administrator, arrives ignorant of the local languages and customs, and needs someone who can serve as interpreter and guide. The foreigner often pays (or overpays) for this arrangement, with money or some other inducement, and thus a codependence between proxy and patron is born. A central theme of “Thieves of State” is the subtle power that these proxies can accumulate and the tendency for the unschooled yet profligate outsider to become hopelessly stymied by his man on the ground.
Because the soldiers and civilians who flooded into Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban did not know how to (or, in some cases, care to) engage with the local population except through their designated fixers, the fixers ended up controlling the aperture through which key members of the international community perceived the conflict.
Corruption and Revolt, New Yorker
Special Inspector General John Sopko, by mandate, focuses on bureaucratic and accounting issues in corruption. He compares performance on projects, to bullet points of what should have been achieved.
He has investigated the effect of his own recommendations, and found it very good.
SIGAR made 209 recommendations to the Department of Defense (DOD) from SIGAR’s inception in January 2008 through June 2014. Of the 196 recommendations that have been closed, DOD has implemented 161 of them to date.
Department of Defense: More than 75 Percent of All SIGAR Audit and Inspection Report Recommendations Have Been Implemented, SIGAR
Though using his own methods, the National Law Journal questions this.
On January 15, 2015, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (“SIGAR”) released a new report, Department of Defense: More Than 75 Percent of All SIGAR Audit and Inspection Report Recommendations Have Been Implemented (“SIGAR Report”). At 86 pages, the SIGAR Report might be expected to robustly catalogue and analyze how the Department of Defense (“DOD”) implemented the 209 recommendations made by SIGAR from January 2008 through June 2014. Upon closer examination, however, that does not appear to be the case. The SIGAR Report provides no definition or explanation of the criteria SIGAR uses to conclude that a recommendation was “implemented,” and it provides scant specifics about whether the outcome of any “implementation” can be seen as a success.
New SIGAR Audit Report Says . . . Very Little -- Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, National Law Journal
The salary of the Special Inspector General, who has objected that the whole damn war has been classified, though not in those words, is secret.
Do the people who have classified basically the whole damn war, to obstruct the release of embarrassing information, really expect that they can get away with it?
it strains credulity to believe
Inconvenient Truths in Afghanistan, New York Times
Joseph Hickman, who was a guard at Guantanamo, has a new book about the deaths of three prisoners in 2006, which were called suicides.
The official story was that the men — Ali Abdullah Ahmed of Yemen and Mani Al-Utaybi and Yasser Al-Zahrani, both from Saudi Arabia — hanged themselves in their cells. Hickman, however, says that Col. Michael Bumgarner, then a high-ranking base officer, told him and fellow guards that the three prisoners took their lives by forcing sheets into their own throats.
The hanging story, Hickman says, was fed to the press as part of a “cover-up,” and the discrepancy between the two versions of what happened that night inspired him to start digging for the truth. With help from a Seton Hall law professor and a team of student-investigators, Hickman has compiled a compelling case that suggests the government’s account of the deaths is deeply flawed.
Hickman’s book includes ghoulish scientific evidence (he says the prisoners’ necks were removed during autopsies and were not with the bodies returned to their families) and eyewitness details: He and several other guards were assigned “to watch the very block where the detainees” died, and if the deaths had occurred as reported by the base’s top officers, he writes, “(i)t would have been impossible for us not to see the detainee’s movements or hear the medics’ voices.”
'Guantanamo Diary’ and 'Murder at Camp Delta’, SFGate
JOSEPH HICKMAN: Well, Colonel Bumgarner—everybody was there that was on duty that night. Colonel Bumgarner got in front of everyone, and he said, "Three detainees committed suicide last night. They shoved rags down their throats. But you’re going to hear something different on the media—from the media." And he said, "You are not to speak to anyone at home. You are not to speak to—you’re not to write letters about this. Remember, we are monitoring you. NSA is monitoring you." And he gave us a direct order not to speak about the suicides.
Did Gitmo "Suicides" Cover Up Murder? U.S. Sgt. Speaks Out on Deaths & Prison’s Secret CIA Site, Democracy Now
They seem, sometimes, to be able to get away with a hell of a lot.