Very interesting...whatcha think Frem? Given it was really the "Suni Awakening" that made the "surge" successful, if this isn't just bullshit, it would ..."/>

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Are actions of 'super-tribe' an Afghan tipping point?

POSTED BY: NIKI2
UPDATED: Tuesday, February 9, 2010 17:16
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 2:05 PM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...


Very interesting...whatcha think Frem? Given it was really the "Suni Awakening" that made the "surge" successful, if this isn't just bullshit, it would be interesting to watch. As many differences as similiarities between the two, but I find it interesting:
Quote:

Beyond the war-ravaged mountains of Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan, a quiet revolution is unfolding.

In the most strategically important area of this vast country, along the border with Pakistan, NATO forces are hoping a new pact involving one of the “super-tribes” of Afghanistan can turn a previously volatile area into a model for how the rest of the country can be pacified.

Some 170 elders from the Shinwari tribe, which numbers about 400,000 people, have signed a pact vowing to burn down the house of anyone found sheltering the Taliban. It is being heralded as a “tipping point” by the U.S. commander of Task Force Mountain Warrior, Col. Randy George.

“It’s a great example, and we certainly hope it will spread, and there’s pieces of it that already have a little bit,” George said. “We are encouraged by it. We have had other tribes that have come forward. Every valley is different. Every tribe is different. We just have to be flexible in how we apply the solutions here in Afghanistan.”

The U.S. authorities in this area – the Army and the State Department – are keen to point out that “this wasn’t a quid pro quo.”

“There wasn’t a link. Certainly, they would expect to be supported,” George said. “What they did was remarkable. It’s courageous they would come together and make these kind of statements, and publicly. We certainly want them to know they are doing all the right things.”

In other words, the pact came first and was then rewarded with a million dollars of aid from the U.S. Army’s Commanders Emergency Response Program.

A State Department representative in the area, Dante Paradiso, says the Taliban have been gradually eroding support among the Shinwari tribe.

“There’ve been a lot of rivalries and a lot of disputes within these communities, but over time, one of the threats that the Taliban and insurgents in general have posed to these communities, is that they have broken down traditional structures,” Paradiso said. “And what you’ve seen is that some of these structures and some of these elders are looking to reassert some of their organic or indigenous cultures, and stand against an insurgency that goes against that.”

U.S. officials will closely monitor how the aid is spent, deciding which subcontractors are used and ensuring that the money is really spent on development, not weapons. But the strategy is high-risk. The tribes have made a very public repudiation of the Taliban and are now expecting the aid to start flowing.

One village we visited, Gulaiye, used to be a narco economy. Everything revolved around the opium trade. Now, they grow vegetables and wheat as part of a deal to renounce opium and the Taliban. But locals told us about their unhappiness at the lack of help from the local government, warning that unless jobs were created, young men there would start to turn back to the Taliban.

The U.S. cash may go some way to alleviating those gripes and shoring up tribal support for NATO, but in societies that are fickle, fractured and poor, nothing is certain.

“I don’t think there are any guarantees in any of this. … That’s why you support positive behavior,” George said. “So we are going to continue to be supportive. It was courageous what they’ve done. … This has been in progress for a while. The situation has generally gotten better in last couple of months, so we’ve already seen some encouraging signs.”

Getting the Shinwari “on side” is critical because of its size: The hundreds of thousands of people under its influence live along the strategically important border with Pakistan. If other tribes can also be persuaded to kick out Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, huge swathes of territory could be denied to the enemy without the need to deploy thousands more NATO troops.

Some have likened it to the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, which proved so vital in reducing violence and forcing out foreign fighters in 2006.

But the situation in Afghanistan is far more complex. The mosaic of tribes and clans in Afghanistan is bewildering. Paradiso says the Shinwari elders have received death threats from the Taliban for denouncing them so publicly.

“That’s to be expected, and that’s where they are showing some real courage in standing together, and that’s part of what drove them,” Paradiso said. “They understand the nature of the threat because they live with it daily.”

http://afghanistan.blogs.cnn.com/2010/02/01/are-actions-of-super-tribe
-an-afghan-tipping-point
/ (interesting video, too) Seems the major statements seems to be: Unemployment=Taliban...where have we heard that before?






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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 2:24 PM

GINOBIFFARONI


Yeah...


We are going to burn down the house of anyone who disagrees with us


Way to promote freedom


Typical of the US to try and form a pro American Taliban of their own




Either you Are with the terrorists, or ... you Are with the terrorists

Life is like a jar of Jalapeño peppers.
What you do today, might Burn Your Ass Tomorrow"

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 2:50 PM

GINOBIFFARONI


Turning folk against each other so they will stop fighting you was a tactic the British used for a hell of a long time... the result

just look at ALL the misery of India / Pakistan as an example. I don't fault the Brits so much, they didn't know what they were creating... But on the other hand the USA has these historical examples of the unintended result of this sort of thing.

As for the success of this in Iraq ? Please


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors
/article2412837.ece


A ‘Sunni awakening’ – and a recurring nightmare
Our correspondent returns to a Baghdad still riven by division and despair

Martin Fletcher


Every time I return to Baghdad the ugliness hits me – the tattered plastic bags trapped in endless coils of razor wire, the miles of ugly concrete blast barriers, the sandbags, checkpoints, ubiquitous guns. The roads are pitted, the pavements crumbling, the cars ancient. Saddam-era ministries and palaces bombed in 2003 still stand abandoned, gaping holes in their flanks. The showpiece hotels are empty. The fancy shops are shut. Rubbish piles up. Water and electricity grow increasingly scarce. Statues are broken. The traffic lights have not worked in years. Billboards have collapsed.

There is nothing new or colourful in the city, nothing of beauty. There are no cinemas or theatres still open, no fountains, no zoo, no car dealerships, shopping malls or well-kept parks. The background noise is not of music, birdsong or children’s laughter, but of generators, helicopters and bursts of gunfire. Its inhabitants hurry home before dusk. It is a baked, dusty, joyless city from which those who can have fled, a city where the preoccupation of those that remain is survival, a city in a seemingly terminal state of neglect and decay. On the flight from Jordan I sat next to a young Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture employee who was returning from five months training in Australia. He had been tempted to stay, but could not abandon his family. “I come back here to die,” he said.

It is small wonder that in such an arid, bleak environment any green shoot causes excitement, and in the past few months there has been rare cause for hope. General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, will doubtless highlight it today when he gives Congress his verdict on George Bush’s troop surge strategy. Sunnis in much of western and central Iraq, including Baghdad, have turned on the foreign-led al-Qaeda jihadists who arrived in their communities promising to eject the infidel Americans. What they actually did was impose a rule of terror, whipping or executing any who opposed their extremism.

The tribal leaders of Anbar province led the way, encouraging thousands of their followers to join the hated Iraqi police and make common cause with the equally reviled US military. Anbar, once the heart of the infamous Sunni Triangle, is now one of the safer provinces in Iraq – so safe that Mr Bush visited it last week. The US military is now trying to replicate the success of Anbar in other Sunni areas by recruiting thousands of Sunni males into groups of “concerned citizens” determined to take back their neighbourhoods.

US generals claim to have al-Qaeda on the run, to have deprived it of the strongholds where it planned its car bomb spectaculars, to have achieved “tactical momentum”. Al-Qaeda attacks have certainly fallen off in recent months, and appear increasingly to be aimed at soft and remote targets such as the unfortunate Yazidi sect who live near the Syrian border: truck bombs killed 500 on August 14.

This “Sunni awakening” is an astonishing development, but as far as bragging rights go it has its limits. For a start, it began months before the “surge”, though the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops probably emboldened more ordinary Sunnis to tackle the extremists in their midst.

More importantly, it has done little to remedy Iraq’s most pressing problem – its sectarian civil war. The anti-American insurgency may be finally losing heat, and al-Qaeda may be off-balance, but those Shia-Sunni emnities that al-Qaeda ignited through deliberate slaughters of Shias show no sign of abating.

The surge has managed to contain those emnities. It has reduced the sectarian violence significantly by moving US troops out of their huge bases and into 29 combat outposts in Baghdad’s worst troublespots. But while it has largely frozen the battle lines in place, there has been little corresponding effort to reconcile Shia and Sunni and heal those festering hatreds.

The Shia-led Government was supposed to have used the breathing space provided by the surge to reach out to the Sunni minority, and to establish itself as a trusted government of national unity. Unfortunately Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, is no Nelson Mandela. Only belatedly, and under heavy US pressure, has the Government made a few conciliatory moves, relaxing restrictions on ex-Baathists taking senior government jobs and sending money to Anbar for reconstruction.

America’s new Sunni allies still regard the Government with profound suspicion, as a puppet of Iran. Most Sunnis have come to rely – irony of ironies – on US troops for protection. At the same time an increasing number of Shias, especially in Baghdad, look to the al-Mahdi Army militia, not the hapless Mr al-Maliki, to provide security and basic services. Far from establishing itself, the national Government is flirting with irrelevance. Even at the best of times most Iraqis put loyalty to tribe or sect above loyalty to the artificial construct that is their country.

Whatever Congress decides, the overstretched US military cannot sustain the surge much beyond next spring. That poses several questions in a capital and country that has increasingly become a patchwork quilt of deeply antagonistic, ethnically cleansed Sunni and Shia enclaves.

Will the violence return as US troops leave? Has their presence merely driven the fighters into other areas? To what extent has al-Qaeda disappeared, or is it merely lying low? Is the slowly improving Iraqi Army anywhere near ready to take the strain? Will the new Sunni police forces and “concerned citizen” groups simply metamorphose into well-armed, well-trained militias?

I spent two days last week in Ghazaliyah, a district of western Baghdad that was a sectarian war zone until the soldiers of the surge moved in. Outwardly, Ghazaliyah is now a success story. Decapitated or disembowelled bodies no longer turn up on the streets each morning. Exiled families have returned to homes on the sectarian fault line that divides the Shia north from Sunni south. Markets have reopened amongst the debris, pools of backed-up sewage and accumulated garbage. It is wonderful to behold, but nobody deludes themselves. There is no contact between the two communities. A Shia still risks his life by talking to a Sunni, and vice versa. Sunni and Shia families both say they will flee again the moment the US troops depart




Either you Are with the terrorists, or ... you Are with the terrorists

Life is like a jar of Jalapeño peppers.
What you do today, might Burn Your Ass Tomorrow"

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 4:39 PM

FREMDFIRMA



Top down solution to a bottom up problem, hacking at the branches instead of striking the root.

So much I wanna say, so much I dare not say.

I will say this, for a ray of hope albeit an unpleasant one, one of my issues about the lack of militancy was that it had become all to easy to shut down many of those schools by violence or the threat of violence, and while working out other issues those who really wanted to spill some blood (a little TOO much) got the bright idea that the answer to assholes willing to blow up schools, is dead assholes.

Out in the boonies away from the cities, if they don't make a big to-do about it, not so likely to be a problem, shoot, shovel, shut up, yanno ?

That's a far better cry than placing a sentry who's job it is to physically body tackle some asshole with a bomb outside the perimeter and try to set it off before it's close enough to do damage - credit to the girls courage, sure, but still.

Bi lingual helps, it helps a lot, since having enough translators is always a problem, especially out there, so one can hope.

-F

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 4:47 PM

CHRISISALL


Quote:

Originally posted by GinoBiffaroni:

Typical of the US to try and form a pro American Taliban of their own

Hey pal, it's worked before in...
uhhhh...

well...

GRENADA!!!




The SNAFU Chrisisall

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010 5:16 PM

KPO

Sometimes you own the libs. Sometimes, the libs own you.


Interesting article, for the optimists.

I would say that strengthening individual tribes like this (and not the central government - same as in Iraq) will have a legacy in the future. Positive or negative I don't know - but I am prepared to say better than the Taliban and AlQaeda.

Heads should roll

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