About a month ago, on the occasion of a lecture by Donald Rumsfeld at a confab of defense minister types in Singapore, I wondered idly how one says "chutzpah" in Chinese.

We've just received the answer courtesy of Justin Logan in, of all places, Astana, Kazakhstan where, at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we also learned how it's said in Russian and a few other languages of the region. As Justin notes, the participants included as honored guests nearby countries such as India, Pakistan and Iran.

Given the recent reemergence of security challenges in Afghanistan, and the apparent scrambling to beef up security -- shifting UK forces from Iraq, a few Aussie SAS to join special ops, etc. -- perhaps there's a bit of reassessment going on right now in Washington? Is there time still before the current Quadrennial Defense Review is due to rethink some of those lily pads ?

Tuesday I attended a presentation by Tyler Hicks, staff photographer for the New York Times (BU COM '92), and pride and joy of the photography department here. For good reason: Hicks has taken some amazing photographs over the past three years, a witness from the ruins of Ground Zero to the mountains of Afghanistan to Iraq, before, during, and after the invasion.


As a slide show of his work, the presentation didn't lend itself especially well to blogging, but you can find some of his pictures (some of which may be familiar to Times readers, but many of which I don't recall having seen before now) on display at the Times website. He also has a book out, with accompanying essays by NYT reporters John F. Burns and Ian Fisher, Histories Are Mirrors: The Path of Conflict through Iraq and Afghanistan. Powerful stuff.

Revised December 6, primarily illustrations and format

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Uyghur Separatism and the Politics of Islam in China's Western Frontier

Colin Cookman

From its earliest inception, the modern Islamic terrorist movement has been transnational and pan-Islamic in character. Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network had its origins in the corps of volunteers known as the "Islamic Internationale", or "Arab Afghans": young men hailing from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the whole breadth of the Middle East who flocked under the banner of jihad to the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the training camps of Peshawar. There they gathered to wage guerrilla war in the name of Islam against the godless Soviet Communists, while the American government looked on with grim satisfaction as it covertly supported efforts to bleed the Russians in their own "Soviet Vietnam".

Following the United States' campaign to topple the Taliban and disrupt Al Qaeda's base in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, news reports tracking captured fighters and key figures in the Al Qaeda leadership regularly reiterated, either explicitly or through non-commental labels of ethnicity, the multinational character of the terrorists' network: U.S. President George W. Bush's "coalition of the willing" was facing off against a stateless, loosely affiliated coalition of the dispossessed, the globally marginalized, and the violently revivalist. Although the biggest names and largest percentage of captured Al Qaeda members continue to be primarily of Middle Eastern or South Asian origin, every now and then reports mention other, more exotic figures in the mix of captured and killed: Chechens from the Caucuses, Uzbeks, Filipino Moros, and, infrequently but not unnoticed, Uyghurs from China's Xinjiang province.

What motivates those small handfuls of anonymous young men to cross the Pamir mountains into Afghanistan and fight alongside the militants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban? In order to attempt an answer, we must examine the origins of Xinjiang's oasis peoples, the Uyghurs, and their aspirations for nationhood; the nature of Chinese rule over them today, and its effects on those aspirations; and the extent to which militant Islamic revivalism may have infiltrated China's western hinterlands, and what implications that holds for the Uyghurs and their region. This paper argues that China's discriminatory policies have, more than any other factor, served to alienate the Uyghurs and increase the appeal of militant Islam, in effect making Beijing's worst fears a reality.
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If you aren't reading Afghan Journal, a diary by aid worker and author Ed Girardet, you should be.

From my perch here in Pittsburgh, Khalilzad seems to have done amazing well considering the obstacles. This is the first time I've read a reasonable case suggesting otherwise; if he's becoming a liability, perhaps it's time we brought in someone perceived as more neutral. Additionally, I think the U.S. would do well to take off the sunglasses and do more mingling with the locals. Girardet also has some prudent advice for handling poppy eradication with the appropriate deftness and patience.

Here's the latest update from Giradet:
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[UPDATE 10:30PM EST 11-30-04] John Robb has translated the Afghan terror/drug conundrum into his "Global Guerrillas"-speak.

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From AdamSmithee, a first-rate source of interesting observations on development economics:

Moral Conundrum

Afghanistan has managed to drag a fair number of people out of absolute poverty in the past two years, with some effect on a range of health indicators. One huge reason is a rebounding opium crop, which may have accounted for as much as 60% of Afghanistan's economic output in 2003. As Brad DeLong points out, if you don't buy Third World products, their makers just have to go off and do something less rewarding. In the case of Afghanistan, that's likely to throw people back into absolute poverty, and that in turn means higher mortality. Heroin addiction is terrible. But death is surely worse. Given that, how hard should we pursuing opium growers in the country?

Well it may not be how we ought to be proceeding, but it seems the way we'll claim we're proceeding is to fight the "war on drugs" as the great scourage of a free and democratic Afghanistan. Via the FT, from a press conference Nov 18 2004:

Britain, the lead nation in the anti-narcotics drive in Afghanistan, admitted that there was a risk of the opium boom re-creating the conditions that the “war against terror” was supposed to eliminate.

Bill Rammell, the British foreign office minister responsible, said Afghanistan was a “narco-economy” and that the west needed to take urgent action.

“We have always held the view that if you have a narco-economy, those are the very conditions in which terrorism breeds,” he told a press conference in Brussels.

On Wednesday the US announced an $800m plan to fight Afghanistan's ballooning opium industry a big increase in spending that reflects growing concern about the threat of the drugs trade to the fragile country.

But the UN report made it clear that such a move could further destabilise the country.

The UN's drugs and crime office suggested that the lucrative poppy crop is one of the few things keeping the lawless country from falling further into anarchy and poverty.

“Narcotics are the main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond between previously quarrelsome people,” it said. The crop is now grown in all 32 Afghan provinces.

Afghanistan's opium economy is put at $2.8bn, producing 87 per cent of the world's total supply.

Now don't get me wrong, and I'm sure we're dealing with different time periods here, but $800 million in anti-drug trade efforts is almost one-third of the drug contribution to GDP. Maybe a simple set of cash transfers would do more to get some other economic activity going than trying to stamp out 60% of the economy?

From this UPI piece in the Middle East North Africa Financial Network we get some good news for Afghanistan, some bad:

Under a program called demobilization and reintegration, or DDR, the Afghan government, begun a process to disarm the militia groups. Although progress has been slower than expected, the process is expected to be complete by June 2005.

"This must happen now with the mandate from the people and all indications are that this is a concern, a high concern of the people," Khalilzad said. "The collection of weapons, the demobilization of militias, and the government will have to deliver on that."

That's the good part, and it's to be hoped that Karzai's government, with the right amount of American support, will be able to take advantage of two and a half decade's worth of cumulative public war-weariness to implement disarmament, either through its political or military force. Unfortunately, there's also this:

According to U.S. estimates, poppy cultivation is expected to jump 40 percent this year. Twenty-eight of 34 Afghan provinces grow poppy and the number of acres under poppy cultivation grew from 197,684 acres in 2003 to 247,105 acres in 2004. The country supplies 75 percent of the world's opium. Expert say the drugs trade, which the Taliban had managed to control during its draconian rule of the country, may be contributing as much as 60 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product. ...   more »

Ah, cotton subsidies:

The Bush administration yesterday formally appealed a World Trade Organization ruling that subsidies paid to U.S. cotton farmers violate global trade rules.

Now, I'm generally in favor of conservation-oriented subsidies. We have to preserve our prime agricultural soils. But programs like Step 2 are bad news, primarily because they make it harder for developing countries to compete.

And helping cotton growers in the developing world ought to be a vital component of a comprehensive war on terrorism. Nearly half of the Pakistani labor force works in agricultural industries, and cotton is the country's top agricultural commodity. While Pakistan has basically eradicated opium poppy production by launching a vigorous crop substitution program in the Northwest Frontier Provinces, Afghanistan's opium production has exploded, particularly in Helmand province, a stronghold of the Taliban. Al Qaeda is said to be hip-deep in the heroin business. Drug money goes to buy AK-47s and explosives that kill Americans.

I'm by no means certain that cotton is an economically viable alternative to poppies. It requires more intensive irrigation and better soil conditions, and the price it fetches may not be high enough at present to meet a family's needs. But despite these problems, Afghanistan still exports cotton somehow. It's clear that cotton works in some areas of the country. Wouldn't we like to give those Afghanistan's farmers who are at the margin every possible incentive to switch?

Why is the Bush administration undermining the War on Terror?

I still don't know what to think about the long-term implications of Afghanistan's elections. Obviously, they have been about as huge a success as possible in the short term. Arthur Chrenkoff, not surprisingly, is energized. This time, he didn't have to stretch to find good news. It looks like the Taliban has been militarily broken and politically marginalized for now, but I worry that the expectations game could work against Karzai if he isn't able to deliver a goat in every pot over the next year. And the next round, the parliamentary elections, could be extraordinarily divisive, as Nir Rosen points out.

But I think this bodes well:

Yunus Qanooni, Hamid Karzai's chief rival in Afghanistan's presidential election, said he will accept the outcome, as Karzai swept the country's south and southeast en route to outright victory.

"I have made sacrifices for the national interests of Afghanistan and I am ready to make another sacrifice," former education minister Qanooni told AFP on Wednesday.

"Observing the visible fraud in the election, and then respecting the national interest of Afghanistan, is a sacrifice."

Asked if that meant he would accept the result he replied: "Yes, you understood me well."

If Karzai can use his mandate to improve the lives of all Afghans (rather than only Pashtuns, who he seems to have won over at the last minute) and avoids the kind of overreaching crackdown that John Robb worries about, Afghanistan may well muddle through. It's not going to be a democracy as we understand the term, but it will be far better than the anarchy of civil war or the bizarre repression of the Taliban.

One final comment: I don't think Zalmay Khalilzad has gotten enough credit for what has been achieved there. He clearly has the political savvy and the toughness for the job. His and Karzai's wheeling and dealing have been the keys to Afghanistan's relative calm. I can't imagine the stress he's been under in keeping devious crooks like Dostum and Fahim from making trouble while sidelining Ismail Khan and getting the Pashtuns on board. It's a shame we don't have anyone with Khalilzad's acumen working for us in Iraq.

Top Stories on the wires [10-8-04 1:00 AM]



A strange sort of terrible beauty

Blast at Indonesian embassy in Paris, seven hurt: fire brigade

At least 30 killed as suspected car bombs rock Egypt's Red Sea coast

Rocket hits Kabul embassy area

Report: U.S. Strike Kills 11 at Iraqi Wedding

Insurgents Hit Baghdad Hotel With Rockets

Explosion Rocks Baghdad Green Zone

Explosion Damages Istanbul Cathedral

An Ominous Drone From the Gaza Sky: Israeli Incursion Uses Modern Weaponry to Lethal Effect
UPDATE [10-10-04 10:AM] by nadezhda: Looking over Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza 10-1-04; photo by Oded Balilty - AP.
Posted to Israel & Palestine Photos

If someone wanted to criticize my recent post about the vice-presidential debate, he or she could point to this:

In an interview, Joseph Collins, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations (the fashionable Pentagon term for peacekeeping), made a blunt appraisal: "The performance of our European brethren is pretty pathetic," he said. "Pretty pathetic." The problem, said Collins, is that "everybody wants to help, but nobody wants to put out. NATO is incredibly badly organized, the NATO nations are incredibly badly organized. The Germans complain all the time about their overstretch, and they've got less than 3 percent of their force abroad." Andrew Wilder, an American who heads the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think tank, said that the alliance has fallen short of its commitments. "I think many of us here have been disappointed by the response of the NATO member states in terms of contributing troops to the Afghan situation," he said. "Especially when they've declared that this is their top priority." NATO is boosting its force during the Oct. 9 presidential election, but Wilder said this is not enough. "For the elections they're increasing that by a couple thousand or so, but then after elections, they're planning to withdraw them again," he said.

Just a hint.