Fear and Loathing in Loya Paktia

While we’re on the subject of Special Forces operations, I must just recount a meeting I had a couple of days ago with some elders from one of the Mangal sub-tribes in Jani Khel district, Northern Paktia.

 

[Briefly, lest I accidentally find myself thrown into the back of a humvee and bundled off to Bagram myself, I should really caveat everything with ‘there are two sides to every story’. Sure there are, I realize that. I will share this particular side, as for now it’s all I have.]

 

Before I go on with the story, the tribal elders I’ve been meeting these past few months have been informing us that they are beginning to reinstate their local arbakai (tribal policing mechanism) as they can’t rely on the Afghan National Security forces for security. Based on these and other discussions with them, I am inferring that levels of frustration against the International Military Forces are reaching their peak and people are so desperate to be rid of the American forces from their areas, they are determined to try secure their own communities in order to avoid any need for the IM.

 

One of the principle reasons the arbakai have generally been effective is that they are from and are paid by their own community, which in turn ensures a level of accountability to their people. Problems generally emerge when outsiders start to interfere and offer to pay / train / equip these local arbakai (again, our friends in the Special Forces have been involved in this recently in a few areas throughout the country. To my knowledge it hasn’t worked).

 

Back to the Jani Khel elders. Their story is a shocking one. We’ve documented the case and are following up on it as best we can, but perhaps my writing about it here as well might be helpful, who knows.

 

Jani Khel is a thickly forested mountainous district in northern Paktia and shares a border with Pakistan. The District Administration Centre has been under construction for the past two years, and again, very few officials can stomach being in the district on a permanent basis. It has been largely law-less this past year and has reportedly been something of a haven for ‘Anti Government Elements’, which of course has brought a lot of attention from the international forces.

 

The elders told us about a Special Forces search operation, which took place a few weeks ago, in which several people were arrested, one of whom is now in Bagram though the elders claim he is illiterate and ‘doesn’t know the first word of the Koran’.

 

“A lot of information is provided to the International Military forces that isn’t correct”, an elder told me. “The community is under pressure from both sides (AGEs and the Americans), but mostly from the Americans”.

 

“During the search operation, the Special Forces took two brothers out from their home in the middle of the night. When they were outside, they separated them, so one small group of SF went with one brother, and another group with the other, so they were out of sight from each other. Then one group fired a shot into the air. The other group holding the other brother said ‘we’ve killed your brother. If you don’t cooperate we’ll kill you too’”.

 

I believe this constitutes a human rights abuse, surely. Is this sort of behaviour legal? Do these officers' commanders know this sort of thing is going on, is this behaviour encouraged? Between you me and the gatepost, I’m fairly certain this isn’t the worse thing that has happened during a search operation.

 

Yesterday morning I attended a tribal jirga at the municipal hall here in Gardez. To get there, we drove in our armoured vehicle replete with 2-inch thick blackened windows through a cold barren husk of a town, and as I looked around me, I realized how thoroughly depressing this place is. All you can see are high walls, decrepit crumbling buildings destroyed during the civil war and yard upon yard of barbed wire lining government building compounds. There wasn’t a living soul to be seen in those cold empy streets, except for the odd emaciated dog sniffing through piles of garbage.

 

Elders from Paktika, Khost and Paktia attended the gathering to discuss how they were going to secure this region (known as Loya Paktia). There was even a Pakistani Waziri there. His pale yellow turban was twice the size of anyone else’s in the room.

 

Once again the elders talked about how only they alone could secure their communities, because no one else was going to do it for them. They also strongly condemned ISAF and said that as long as they were here, there would be no peace. They actually went further than that, angrily shouting into the microphone that the presence of ISAF was making things worse.

 

After two and a half hours of speeches and the odd poetry recital by various heads of tribes as well as from the deputy minister of tribal and border affairs in Kabul, the deputy governor, chief of police and a number of others, one young woman who had been sitting at the front of the room the whole time looking very nervous stood up.

 

She was an ISAF representative (I assume sent from Kabul) and addressed the crowd with a half smile. She thanked them for welcoming her, though her words came out sounding flat and rehearsed. She must have been terrified, aware of the fact that she wasn’t the most popular person in the room.

 

She read her spiel from a piece of paper, then looked up at her audience. She said that her boss, General McChrystal, assured the people of Afghanistan that they would be in charge of the future of their country and that ISAF would be there for as long as people needed them in order to ‘rebuild and secure Afghanistan’.

 

A very nice speech by all accounts, which was met with hesitant applause – but I wonder how much longer people will clap politely, having heard these words so many times before, words falling on the ears of people who are becoming more and more angry and disillusioned as each year goes by.