TIME and USNews both report, in nearly identical stories, that Afghanistan's elections are going to be wild and wooly.

Says TIME:

Karzai has some legitimate campaign challenges. A senior Afghan official says Iran, Russia and Pakistan are throwing money at different candidates. A Kabul black-market money changer claimed that the dollar's recent rise against the afghani, from 52 to 45, was due to the sudden influx of dollars. "In my village," says Fida Mohammed, who is from the Shomali Plain near Kabul, "our elders are seeing who offers us most before telling us how we should vote."

Alarmed by the possibility that Karzai might not win in the first round (experts say he would win a runoff against any single candidate), the President's supporters — including the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad — are scrambling to shore up votes. Senior Afghan officials, U.N. representatives and Western diplomats all claim that Khalilzad, an energetic Afghan American, is trying to induce several candidates — including the President's main rival, Qanooni — to drop out and throw their support behind Karzai. The ambassador denies that, even though one candidate, Mohammed Mohaqiq, went public with such an accusation. Khalilzad and Karzai dine together at least three times a week, palace insiders say, and many Afghans, by nature conspiratorially minded, are convinced that the election's outcome is rigged to favor Karzai.

Good enough for me.

I'm about midway through Ahmed Rashid's Taliban and finding it fascinating (and I'm relieved to see much more readily accessible than his Jihad, which I still haven't gotten around to finishing all the way through). In any case, I think one of the most striking observations Rashid makes is the extent to which the Taliban militans were almost completely disassociated from their own culture and history -- that twenty years of war against the Soviets had so completely dislocated the Afghan refugee population that the madrassa students who absorbed the creed of the Wahhabi and Deobandi Islamicists along the Pakistan border and then returned home to combine it with their conservative pashtunwali culture to take up arms as the Taliban were nearly completely ignorant of Afghanistan's own much more tolerant Sufi-inspired religious traditions and operated largely outside of the tribal structure that was previously the political norm. With the educational and family structure destroyed and disrupted by war, there was no normalcy for them, and so they turned inward to an isolated, severely puritanical military brotherhood.

In one of the addenda to Soldiers of God Robert Kaplan references this with the observation that "the most dangerous movements are often composed of war orphans, who, being unsocialized, are exceptionally brutal", giving the Khmer Rouge (who I think would probably qualify as my personal number one candidate for total scale of atrocities committed upon a particular civilization) and Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front as two other examples.

I think this offers many deep implications for other areas around the world where chronic war has eradicated any semblance of normal life, and so I was wondering whether any readers or fellow bloggers could reccommend further reading on the subject of something like child soldiers or efforts to rebuild an area after the traditional social structure has been heavily disrupted, or even just something on educational theory in these sorts of nation-building struggles. I picked up Fukuyama's State-Building on praktike's recommendation but haven't started yet -- is this sort of question addressed in there, perhaps? I imagine it's an issue confronted most frequently in Africa, which I know very little about, so anything readable on any of these sort of lines will be much appreciated.

Parts 1b through 3 of "The Single Most Serious Threat to the National Security of the United States" will be forthcoming as time permits, but since I spent seven hours today getting myself certified in Basic First Aid, I haven't had a chance to research up anything sufficiently detailed for what I imagine for my future posts.

I did get a chance to finish up the book I was currently reading through, Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God. I picked this one up off the shelves of the BPL to tide me over until my booklist order arrived for my South Asia course, and while it kept my attention, in the end it proved more valuable for visual and anecdotal texture than anything else. Kaplan makes some interesting observations and has a nice talent for describing the lands and some of the characters that populate Afghanistan, but offers no systemic analysis of the muj and not much in the way of a coherent narrative - befitting the nature of the conflict, perhaps, but his choppy chapter layouts, which weave in and out of multiple fronts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, multiple historical eras, and multiple trips in and out of Afghanistan -- make it hard to tell what, if anything, he's getting at in any particular chapter of the book.

   more »

Warlords to help ensure safe Afghan elections:

Afghanistan is looking for help from warlords and other local leaders as well as foreign forces and its own army to ensure security for landmark Oct. 9 elections, a U.N. official said on Tuesday.

Well that's one way to do it. I think what we're really talking about here in Afghanistan is going to be "power-sharing," not democracy per se.

As long as it leads to a modus vivendi that allows reconstruction to continue, minimizes violence, and marginalizes the Taliban, I suppose it's the best we can hope for.

The New York Observer has an odd story about a CBS connection to Jack Idema, the crazed freelancer who was busted for running his own private gulag in Afghanistan:

According to Mr. Idema’s lawyer, John Edwards Tiffany, as well as network sources and people on the ground in Kabul, CBS News had prior knowledge of Mr. Idema’s private jail before his arrest on July 5. According to early reports, eight prisoners were interrogated and tortured there, some found hanging from the ceiling by their feet.

On Tuesday, Sept. 22, Mr. Tiffany showed The Observer a 10-minute videotape that features Mr. Idema interrogating suspected Al Qaeda operatives in his makeshift detention center. It revealed a watermark showing it had been transmitted via CBS satellites. The footage was relayed to Mr. Idema’s licensing company in New York in early July from Mr. Rather’s offices. At the start of the reel, a standard TV test pattern with the watermark "CBS NEWS KABUL" can clearly be seen on the screen. The film looked like an Afghan version of the reality show Cops, complete with Mr. Idema’s own segment titles at the beginning of each raid. It features clips of Mr. Idema and his "Task Force Saber" running around in fatigues with assault rifles, arresting Afghan people whom Mr. Tiffany identified as suspected terrorists.

Here's the other interesting part:

Mr. Idema has said he was working closely with a woman at the Pentagon named Heather Anderson, the acting director of security for Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, who reports to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. As it happens, Mr. Cambone is at the heart of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a key participant in the Pentagon’s effort to hire private contractors to do intelligence work—the kind that led to the infamous acts of torture first reported by Mr. Rather and 60 Minutes II producer Mary Mapes.

"We were in touch with the Pentagon at the highest level, sometimes five times a day," Mr. Idema told a scrum of reporters at his arraignment.

But in that same interview, Mr. Idema admitted that he did not have an official contract with the government.

"Ms. Anderson in fact applauded our efforts and told us in phone conversation that in fact they wanted to place us under contract," he said. "We did not want to go under contract. We wanted to work with the assets we had in the Northern Alliance."

The Pentagon has since admitted that it not only spoke with Mr. Idema, but had taken two of his prisoners into custody, both of whom later proved to be innocent. According to the Defense Department, it had considered Mr. Idema’s turnover of captives an unsolicited tip and not a formal arrangement.

Remember the Washington Times story about how the U.S. is hiring bounty hunters to catch bin Laden?

One wonders.

UPDATE [9/28/04 9:53AM] by praktike: The Asia Times has more, and seems very confident that Idema was, in fact, working for the Pentagon. I find it strange that this story would be in the NY Observer and the Asia Times, two rather obscure publications. Have the big boys looked at this and smelled something fishy about Idema's story, or are they working on it? Seymour?

Of all the classes I'm taking this year, I think my Islam in South Asia course has the potential to be the most interesting -- in part because it is all very much new frontiers for me personally in my studies, in part because of the increased profile of South and Central Asia in our post-9/11 security conceptions, and also in large part because of the professor himself. A former reporter in Afghanistan during the jihad (he briefly met bin Laden "back when he was nobody"), a former Pakistani ambassador to Sri Lanka, and an expert on political Islam in its various permutations, Professor Haqqani leavens his considerable personal experience (he's recently mentioned his friend former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as a possible guest speaker at some point in class) by engaging readily with his students; a diplomat's skills at personability, no doubt.

In any case, my having come to the class already familiar with (and with plenty more questions about) the broad outlines of the Afghan conflict and the twin roles of Pakistan and the US in shaping the anti-Soviet jihad through having read Steve Coll's Ghost Wars has given me a bit of a rapport with him, but not so much that I wasn't rather startled when out of the blue in class last Thursday he asked me if I'd be willing to comb through the book for some quotes he would be using in a book he's working on. Well... sure, why not? I've certainly never been asked to be a research assistant before (if you could call it that) but hey, I'm not about to pass up the opportunity. So last weekend, borrowing his copy of the book (Amazon just delivered mine yesterday), I set about skimming over the pages again looking for quotes (which, having compiled and handed on to him last Monday, I've now got burning a hole in my hardrive waiting to be put to use in some blog posts; I've attached the complete list I found at the end of this post for others' use, and there are a lot of them -- the one in this post's title on page 166 definitely being my personal favorite) on the liasons between the US CIA and the Pakistani ISI and how the Americans were initially content to a great extent to sit back and allow the Pakistanis control where US money would be funnelled. This lax oversight of American money and materiel is a dominant theme in the early parts of Coll's book, -- having set the CIA to the goal of bleeding the Soviets, the Americans in Islamabad and Washington, D.C. left questions of who would be undertaking that task (and thus gaining training and support) and what kind of political future might follow to Pakistan's ISI and ruling junta under the political Islamist General Zia ul-Haq.    more »

MC Masterchef reminded me that Barnett Rubin's The Fragmentation of Afghanistan contains valuable information that is still relevant today.

Here are a few nuggets that may help explain why Karzai is likely to be opposed for some time, why he must rely on the United States to stay in power, and why Pakistan cannot be fully trusted to support him.   more »

Nadezhda has often complained that it's difficult to find good war reporting in the establishment press, which tends to focus at a higher level and relate every event to the presidential election.

Luckily, one news organization still has chops: Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau.

Here's a great example of how it can be done.
   more »

David Fox of Reuters has a story -- with a groan-inducing headline -- about how both Hamid Karzai and his chief electoral rivals, an alliance of Yunus Qanuni, the former education minister, and Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim are trying to wrap themselves in Masood's martyrdom. The latter benefit from their status as Panjshiris who were close to Massood, although Karzai has received the endorsement of Ahmad Zia Masood, the brother of the slain mujahedin commander. Masood has become the John McCain of Afghanistan.

   more »