Registan.net

Some time ago, I discussed an article Philip Smucker wrote about the presence of Al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. I was mostly skeptical of this section in particular:

Interviews with US military commanders and American radio intercepts of Arab and Chechen fighters as well as confirmed captures or kills of foreign fighters inside Afghanistan bolster the findings…

An Afghan, working with Western forces in Afghanistan and who asked to remain anonymous, said he had monitored al-Qaeda radio traffic in a Paktika province district that is a stronghold of the Haqqani network, run by Sirajuddin Haqqani. “I set up a radio scanner two months ago and I picked up Chechens and Arabs talking regularly,” he said. “At one point, we heard an Arab talking to a Chechen say, ‘Hey, the money has come in, you can attack soon’.” The Afghan said that an Afghan al-Qaeda figure, Maulvi Twaha, who he said he had personally seen shoot dead five Afghan students in 2001, was operating openly in the province, assisting foreign agents and fighters to enter and leave the region.

An American, embedded as a trainer with the Afghan National Army, confirmed similar radio traffic. “It sounds from radio chatter like they have more recruits coming in, including Arabs, Uzbeks, Turkmen and Chechen fighters,” said US Army Major Cory Schultz, 37, from the San Francisco Bay Area.

At the time, I raised some doubts:

For years, since the start of the war, the existence of Chechens inside Afghanistan has been repeatedly asserted in the press but no one has ever presented proof of their existence. Indeed,that Smucker relies on an anonymous Afghan monitoring radio broadcasts to claim the presence of Chechens is telling: does that magical Afghan speak Chechen? Can he tell the difference between that and other Caucasian, slavic, or Central Asian languages?

I know and like Major Schultz, but again: how does he know? Does FOB Bermel just happen to have Turkic linguists and Chechen-fluent analysts to tell them what they’re listening to? For example, nearby Zabul province has a noticeable population of Uzbeks living near Qalat, the provincial capital: can their linguists tell the difference between Turkmen and Uzbek? I’ve never heard of Turkmen being in the southeast like that. That doesn’t mean it’s untrue—and I don’t think anyone is lying, let me emphasize that—but this kind of assertion is completely at odds with what we otherwise know of the area.

I was able to get in touch with Major Schulz (Smucker misspelled his name), and he had something startling to say. “I never said the quote that he used,” he told me via email. Major Schulz continued, “I stated that there have been reports that Chechens have been in the area but we have no way of verifying this information.”

That’s quite a different story than the one Smucker told, and Major Schulz offered several additional complaints about Smucker’s conduct and questioning while he was there. Major Schulz argues that Smucker, “chose to print contrary statements even though we told him the information he was getting was wrong.” Among the assertions Smucker made was that most of the violence in the area was driven by Al Qaeda; Major Schulz claims he and his team told Smucker they were actually tribal and local, not Al Qaeda.

“Multiple times,” Major Schulz said, he and his captain, “told him that his information was totally off and he chose to run with it anyway.” He attributes the slant of the reporting to a dispute Smucker had with the local PAO.

If the allegations are true, then they are serious, as they would imply that Philip Smucker knowingly printed false or misleading statements attributed to individuals who dispute them. That is a serious ethical violation. I have been unable to resolve how much the Asia Times fact-checked Smucker’s article—they have been caught out on this front before.

For Smucker himself, this is also a potentially damaging charge. While he garnered a lot of praise for his reporting from Tora Bora in 2001, in 2003 he was implicated when the Christian Science Monitor had to apologize and withdraw Smucker’s reporting regarding Saddam Hussein’s alleged payments to British Member of Parliament George Galloway.

When contacted for this post, Smucker insisted his version of the story was drawn directly from his notes, and that he presented an accurate account of the conversation. I lack the ability to mediate between the two—unless there is a recording somewhere, it’s kind of a he-said/she-said thing.

The Chechen thing worries me, though. From my conversations with Smucker, there seems to be an overriding sense in several U.S. and NATO units that there is a massive Chechen presence both within al Qaeda and in particular as a significant presence among the foreign fighters in Afghanistan. The evidence for this is… someone saying they heard it on a radio intercept and anonymous officials saying they exist. I’m afraid that’s not sufficient to overcome my original skepticism—when I was at FOB Salerno, a cultural adviser who grew up in the U.S. told me that many Afghans call fair-skinned foreign fighters “Chechen” in part because that’s what they think the Americans want to hear (which is a larger problem with interpreters not being fully qualified—a topic well beyond our scope here).

Then there’s the language issue. I’d be doubtful if even a fluent Russian-speaker could tell the difference between Chechen, Ingush, Agul, Avar, Azeri, or Nogai. Being able to recognize a Turkic language like Uzbek probably won’t help much, either. Given the other cases I know of where someone is identified as Chechen then found out to be of another Russian ethnicity, I find it difficult to just sort of accept that based on SIGINT in a language I know no one in the Yukon AO speaks, they know there are Chechens nearby.

It’s also important to note that Al Qaeda itself has a compelling interest in selling the presence of Chechens amongst its ranks in South Asia. It makes the jihad look more international (and thus, in theory, more attractive to new recruits), and it presents a pleasing boogeyman to distract attention from the Punjabs and Arabs in the group. Just as how petty criminals in Kapisa claim to be HiG because it makes them sound scary, so too is it entirely possible Al Qaeda claims Chechens to make itself seem something it is not.

None of this is to dismiss Chechnya or Chechen radicals as an issue. They are. There just isn’t much evidence beyond hearsay that there are many, if any, Chechens fighting the jihad outside of Chechnya. And it still doesn’t mean they don’t exist, merely that I don’t find Smucker’s published evidence convincing of much, and one of his interview subjects vigorously disputes what he wrote.

As I said above, Smucker says his quote came directly from his notebook. Major Schulz claims the quote comes from disassociated snippets of the discussion, and is not representative of their conversation or his intent in speaking. Major Schulz aso adds, “if [Smucker’s] notes are that accurate then why is my name misspelled, my age incorrect and where I’m from wrong?” He adds he has seen “zero proof” beyond scattered rumors that there any Chechens anywhere in Afghanistan. I’m investigating further, and will post more when I can find out anything more.

As said before, I am studying in Almaty this summer, trying to get my Kazakh Language skills as high as possible.  Here’s a link to some of my efforts - comments welcome.

To begin with, I want to say a few sentences in disclaimer.  I understand that writing from a specific place is an easy way to give weight to one’s opinions and observations.  However, I am still capable of mistakes and I still stand by my opinions as being merely opinions and observations, made without intent to offend.

That being said, here is what I’ve seen in the past couple weeks, if I may have license to generalize a little bit.  This is not the normal blog entry, no links to other news, just my own perhaps-ill-informed opinions.  I’m stating these to open discussion, not to state fact - if you disagree, please don’t start by assuming that we are standing on opposite sides of the issue.
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Well, Carlotta Gall has actually said it all in the lede:

The mood of the Afghan people has tipped into a popular revolt in some parts of southern Afghanistan, presenting incoming American forces with an even harder job than expected in reversing military losses to the Taliban and winning over the population.

I’m glad she’s back.

Joshua Foust (me!), February 27, 2007:

Yet even after years of what the IMF calls “building capacity,” Kabul cannot manage its resources effectively. Trying to unravel the financial mess, the World Bank in late 2005 drafted a report on Afghanistan’s public finances. It contains some sobering statistics: domestic revenues are only 5% of GDP, the fiscal deficit is financed entirely by a foreign aid, the entire operating budget is managed by a trust fund. The government cannot directly channel the reconstruction money, so it delegates to NGOs and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As a result, it exercises no control, no accountability, and, most ominously, no legitimacy over the reconstruction process…

Making all aid projects budgetary line items—turning them local, instead of keeping them foreign—would make the reconstruction more about Afghanistan itself and less about the interests of the donor countries… projects should be coordinated through various local government ministries, essentially turning them into contractors of the national government. This would introduce two improvements: a domestic budget to keep track of how money is spent, and an additional layer of legitimacy for the central government.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, July 1, 2009:

Despite commitments from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development that they would send additional personnel to help the new forces in southern Afghanistan with reconstruction and governance development, State has added only two officers in Helmand since the Marines arrived. State has promised to have a dozen more diplomats and reconstruction experts working with the Marines, but only by the end of the summer.

To compensate in the interim, the Marines are deploying what officers here say is the largest-ever military civilian-affairs contingent attached to a combat brigade — about 50 Marines, mostly reservists, with experience in local government, business management and law enforcement. Instead of flooding the area of operations with cash, as some units did in Iraq, the Marine civil affairs commander, Lt. Col. Curtis Lee, said he intends to focus his resources on improving local government.

Well, the devil is in the details, I suppose. As I’ve said before: I really don’t think the Marines quite understand the scope of what they’re attempting to do, and I hope they’re doing it with a years-long view. Because governance problems in Helmand won’t be fixed in a single summer, or even a single calendar year. Again: I hope they can find a way where all the others have failed.

Either way, I’ll be on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight, umm, tonight, to discuss all of this. Tune in at 5 p.m. EST.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s coverage of the new USMC Offensive into Helmand Province takes great pains to emphasize that the Marines are going to focus not on going out and killing Taliban, but on creating space for governance in the area. At a high level, it makes a lot of sense, even if I think they might not quite realize just how tough their job is.

Yochi Dreazen, on the other hand, emphasizes all of the kinetic aspects of the operation, detailing how the focus will be on finding and killing the proprietors of weapons caches, along with drug interdiction and “persuasion” to get farmers to plant wheat instead of poppy. It’s not until the second-to-last paragraph that Dreazen mentions the idea of “protecting the populace.”

What’s the primary difference between the two journalists? Chandrasekaran is writing from Camp Leatherneck, a big Marine base in Helmand Province near the also-big Camp Bastion. His sources are local Marine officers discussing the intent of the mission. Dreazen, on the other hand, is writing from Washington, DC, quoting Nicholson’s public statements and an anonymous officer he contacted in Kabul.

Which one is right? Is either? Frankly, I don’t know—I respect both’s work, and they both don’t really have noticeable agendas. Could be they’re each zeroing in on different aspects of the mission, or one got insider-y access the other didn’t. It could also be that this mission, like so many others, has such a wide range of goals they can both be right… which of course makes me wonder if it’s realistic to try to achieve everything (and if it’s okay to allow some things to be done halfway in the process).

But again: I don’t know. I just find the contrast striking.

I’ve been pretty vicious this week. Sorry for being so over-cranky—for some reason, the usual Sturm und Drang of the internets has been getting under my skin much more than usual. Regular programming will resume after a nice, long weekend.

Michael J. Totten—remember him?—has a guest author, a former PCV no less, discussing the recent rioting in Georgia.

The events swirling within Iran have been nothing short of startling, taking the world by surprise by its speed and intensity. Perhaps it’s testament to the Army of Davids globalization schema that, for weeks, the top two trending topics on the surprisingly super-relevant Twitter were about the events in Iran. While most have been vocal in their support for the protestors in Iran, other ‘pragmatic’ voices have ranged from cautious to dismissive. Among some of the comments have been some who cynically compare the rather withered, unclearly-supported opposition protests in Georgia with the proto-revolution in Iran. By extension, these analogies imply equivalence between Georgia’s temperamental president Mikheil “Misha” Saakashvili and the apocalyptic lunacy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Suffice to say that this is gross skewing of realities that needs to be put to bed immediately.

How super-relevant—he’s talking about me! However, here’s one problem: using the exact same metrics he sets up for discussing the Georgian protests, the protests in Iran are also “unclearly supported” (whateverthehell that means). Except I’m wrong for saying so, and he accused me of implying moral equivalence between Saakashvili and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Sound honest to you? Exactly. Is he seriously implying that the Georgian opposition is orchestrated in Moscow? Really? A serious person could not possibly think so: the most important opposition leaders, like most Georgian politicians, are anti-Russian, just not suicidally so the way that Saakashvili often seems.

Anyway, in both Iran and Georgia, the protests are almost entirely urban phenomena. But Michael “I love Instapundit so much I can’t stand it” Cecire uses “swirling” in the first sentence, cites Army of Davids, attaches a bizarre eroticism to invading other countries while elevating General Petraeus to the status of Saint, and calls Ahmadinejad “apocalyptic,” so he’s golden with that whole twisted Kaplan-worshipping crowd.

Sigh. This man found it sensible last August to advocate going to war with Russia over an unimportant spec on a map run by a petty arrogant man who speaks with a pleasing lilt. PLEASE LISTEN TO HIS SAGE THOUGHTS.