The Globe and Mail's Paul Koring and Graeme Smith have written a very sobering assessment of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.
Then: Aid workers could could could travel anywhere in Kandahar province; no districts of Afghanistan were labelled "extreme risk" by the United Nations as of May 2005
Now: By June 2006, two of Kandahar province's 17 districts were labelled "extreme risk"; The pink colour that designates extreme risk areas now dominates the threat assessment map of southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, the G&M doesn't migrate its newspaper graphics to the website. But the high-risk areas basically follows the Pashtun fault line I talked about in my Korengal Valley post of earlier this week. The story does note the insurgency doesn't appear to be spreading beyond the Pashtun areas.
I tried to find these mythical UN threat maps online, but no luck. If someone has a link, I'd be most grateful if you shared. You can leave a comment below or e-mail me (above right).
Anyway, there are 2,500 Canadian soldiers in Kandahar. Of that, there's a 1,000-soldier battle group. Of that, there are roughly 600 "outside the wire" at any one time, according to the story.*
* In a Feb. 7 post, Afghanistan by the numbers, I compared British troop levels in Helmand province to Canadian ones in Kandahar.
Kandahar province is roughly the size of Nova Scotia. Kosovo is one-quarter the size of Kandahar, yet NATO sent 40,000 troops there in 1999 when there was no active insurgency. There's still "NATO has five times as many troops deployed in Kosovo as Canada has in Kandahar," the article said.*
* Actually, I thought there were 16,000 NATO troops in Kosovo, which means there is more than six times the number of NATO troops there than Canadians in Kandahar.
Military commanders often sneer at the United Nations threat maps, saying that civilian analysts exaggerate the risks, but security officials say the UN mapping generally reflects the military's own classified analysis, and it's far from the only measure by which Afghanistan's security has worsened in the past two years.
In a blunt assessment this week, Vice-Admiral Michael McConnell, the U.S. intelligence czar, admitted that the Karzai government controls less than one-third of the country. The Taliban hold 10 per cent on a more-or-less permanent basis while the rest is run by local warlords, he said, describing the situation as deteriorating.
Even that gloomy picture may represent an airbrushed version of events, some analysts say, because increasing collusion between Taliban and local powerbrokers — criminal groups, warlords, drug barons, ordinary farmers and even government authorities — allows the insurgents to operate freely in districts without exerting visible control.
A rising campaign of intimidation in recent months also seems aimed at persuading those still undecided about the Taliban. Police officers' bodies, shot or beheaded, have been dumped in public places. Other corpses hang from trees, dangling from nooses with the word "spy" scrawled on a note attached to the body. More detailed notes are posted at night on the front doors of anybody suspected of having sympathies for the Kabul government, warning of deadly consequences for anybody who helps what the Taliban call a "puppet regime." It's well known that the insurgents rarely make empty threats.
Even if villagers aren't afraid of the Taliban, many join up because they find the new government unpalatable. No regime has ever been overthrown at the ballot box in Afghanistan, so political opposition often becomes part of the insurgency.
Many Afghans view the government as a family business, reaping the spoils from foreign donors at the expense of those who don't belong to the well-connected tribes or family networks.
They watch government officials profit from the drug trade, and grow angry when eradicators destroy their small field of poppies. And in the battle-scarred landscape where Canadians operate, many people nurse deep grudges against the foreign troops after having their relatives detained or killed in the years of fighting.
"That's where we're seeing the growth in this insurgency, from the local grievances," Joanna Nathan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, said.
Oxfam released a report Thursday on peace-building in Afghanistan. More from the Globe:
The author of the latest Oxfam report, Matt Waldman, said the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan has inspired other creative ideas about what should happen next.
"We need to think hard about the entire international approach to Afghanistan," Mr. Waldman said.
In an interview at his Kabul office, the respected analyst said he has grown enthusiastic about an approach called "community peace-building," which envisions local meetings to solve the squabbles over land, water or patronage that often simmer underneath the broader reasons for conflict. The solutions may not resemble the kind of Afghanistan that outsiders want, he said, but in some places they may bring peace.
"The secret to success will be not imposing Western ideas and values," he said.