Missing in much of the discussion over the abandoned firebase in Want, Nuristan, is the role civilian casualties may have played in creating an environment suitable for blowback. While the assault on the peaceful wedding party in Nangarhar got all the attention, almost no one paid attention to the other group of innocents bombed in Nuristan the day before. Naturally, NATO and the US denied they ever kill civilians, even (especially?) when there is no reason to—leaving them with the uncomfortable duty of accusing entire parties of women and children dressed up for a marriage of being Taliban sympathizers and insurgents. This is at the heart of the lie about air strikes in Afghanistan—target everything so well, remove even the potential for mistakes, and all you’re left with is bad guys… whether or not the victims really are.
One of the victims of the underreported Waigal Valley bombing, courtesy RAWA.
This matters tremendously. By all accounts—both Richard Strand and David Edwards studied different groups (the Kalasha and Safi Pashtuns, respectively) along the Kunar/Nuristan border—Communist atrocities against civilians are what caused the 1978 Pech Uprising, the first sustained resistance to foreign rule in Afghanistan. Literally, excessive civilian casualties in this area sparked the resistance war.
Making matters worse is the way Afghan officials who complained of U.S. actions are treated: they are unceremoniously fired. Tamim Nuristani, an Afghan who used to run a fried chicken restaurant in Brooklyn and later a line of pizza parlors in Sacramento, had been Governor of Nuristan for some time.
Tamim Nuristani reviews development projects with U.S. Navy Cmdr. Sam Paparo, the head of the provincial reconstruction team, courtesy NPR.
NPR wrote glowingly of his plans for the area:
“We are right now working … to have a small city built on the other side with everything — and maybe about 20,000 people, houses and apartments to support the government side,” Nuristani says. “They are working on the plan. Maybe few months it’s going to be ready.”
The 50-year-old governor says Parun — the first city in Nuristan — is only the beginning for a province where residents farm and raise goats to survive. His five-year goal is for Nuristan to be a destination for Afghan and foreign tourists.
This is a pretty big deal. One of the challenges David Katz highlighted in his presentation hosted by Boston University was the problem Parun faces in terms of being a backwater outpost: the government pays officials the exact same there as they do for any other provincial capital, only Parun is cut off and extremely difficult to access. So it is an inaccessible, remote, tiny outpost with no amenities… which is why the provincial government cannot convince anyone to take up a position there. Nuristani’s plans aimed to reverse that, and make it a generally pleasant place to live that isn’t totally cut off from the outside world. Indeed, Nuristani has been skilled at arguing millions of dollars out of the PRT and local brigades for road construction to help improve transit in the area, and apparently had big plans for developing Parun into a small city to support the provincial government—exactly what the area needs.
Alas. He complained the U.S. was not paying enough attention to the lives of the people he was appointed to rule, and the IDLG saw a good reason to force him out. So he’s gone now, replaced by Hazrat Din Noor Jalali, also a Nuristani native (though of Nurgram District, where the country’s newest PRT is located). While we could quibble over whether a successful Americanized businessman or a commander for a mostly successful mujahideen group (Hazrat Din once served under Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, and later under Ahmed Shah Massoud) is better for the province, it is interesting to see that many people complained Tamim Nuristani didn’t travel enough throughout the province. How ironic.
This problem is not going away, and no one seems willing to do much about it. The U.S. just responds that it bombs wedding parties because it came under attack—from whom, no official is willing to say (“militants in the area” doesn’t really cut it). But the situation there now certainly does not give the locals—who have a quite justified and well-honed xenophobia anyway—much of a reason to throw their support behind the U.S., NATO, or Kabul. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal noted of the July 14 attack on the Want firebase:
The number of attackers Sunday suggests at least some local cooperation. The northwest provinces of Kunar and Nuristan have remained trouble spots for U.S. troops despite U.S. efforts to woo the populace by building schools and roads and encouraging soldiers to mix with the local people.
Officials said the military base was little more than an outpost of fewer than 200 soldiers that was set up adjacent to a hamlet just last week. At 4:30 a.m. Sunday, the Taliban opened fire with small arms, grenade launchers and mortars. In the ensuing gun battle they fired on U.S. troops from houses and a mosque in the hamlet, officials said.
The besieged soldiers called in air strikes to disperse the attack. As in the past, that spawned accusations of civilian casualties: Tamin Nuristani, former governor of the province of Nuristan, said he was told that 34 locals were killed Monday when the U.S. dropped bombs on homes in a nearby village where wounded Taliban fighters had sought refuge after Sunday’s fighting.
It is the same problem, again and again. More civilians were killed a few days ago in rocket fire in Nuristan. At what point does it become a serious impediment to the goals of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism? Upwards of 97 civilians have died under NATO and American bombs this year, some in training exercises while harvesting melons. To pretend that such avoidable deaths do not fuel the insurgency and remove any incentive for locals to assist in governance, security, and development, is to live in a fantasyland.
Our tactics and strategy in Afghanistan require a serious overhaul. But until the people in charge wake up, stop firing good governors who are clearly concerned for their own people’s safety, and adopt more population-friendly tactics, the situation will only continue to crumble.
Update: See this post for more thoughts on how a rash of civilian bombings nearby may have contributed to local complicity in the July 13 assault on the U.S. firebase in Want, Nuristan province.
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