'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Continuing bad news for US/NATO in Afghanistan

Actually, perhaps trending pretty rapidly toward the truly catastrophic?

Joshua Fost of Registan blogged earlier today that "Ghazni Province is falling to the Taliban." (Map and basic info on Ghazni are here.)

Later in Foust's post, he seems to backtrack a bit, writing,

There’s no way to know if that’s what is going on in Ghazni. There is almost no media presence there... and non-essential [US/NATO] units are starting to avoid the area (one friend told me the special forces there are advising non-SOF groups to stay away because of the danger). Without more information, we don’t know for certain how things are shaping up in the province as a whole, but given how many districts had zero voting during the elections (reportedly 11), it’s pretty clear the Taliban are claiming the province bit by bit.

The problems reported there regarding the recent election are part of the even broader crisis of governance and legitimacy that is facing the US/NATO presence in the country.

Today, too, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission "annulled ballots from dozens of polling stations in Afghanistan's presidential election... kicking off a lengthy fraud investigation that could keep Afghans locked in political uncertainty for months."

Interestingly, Ghaszni was one of the three provinces described by the ECC with the most fraud identified in its reported election results.

On ABC TV news tonight, I heard US special envoy Richard Holbrooke expressing what seemed like a first attempt to fudge on the sanctity of the Afghan elections. He was arguing something like, "Oh, here are problems in elections everywhere... "

Perhaps, Richard. But not problems on the order of the problems the ECC is uncovering.

Meanwhile, additional indications of the extent of the Taliban/insurgent influence in the country come from the series of maps at this website for the NGO International Council on Security and Development (though I don't think the main there is completely probative.)

But also from this account by recently released NYT journo Steve Farrell of the four days he spent as a captive of Taliban in northern Kunduz province.

He wrote,

There was no doubting the absolute force of their writ in the area southwest of Kunduz, which we traversed time and again, in an area of cornfields, rice plantations, mud brick villages, waterways and other farmlands, measuring perhaps eight miles long by three or four miles wide. They drove down lanes, through villages, stopping at will and talking to residents, boasting about how the people provided a willing intelligence service to them. The extent of volition was impossible to determine, but the Taliban were the only armed presence I saw there for four days.

Interestingly, they paid when they needed gas for the car, instead of just commandeering it, which they could have easily done. Some villagers appeared very friendly, others more wary and formally polite.

Motorists unfailingly gave way as soon as they saw a Taliban car coming in the other direction, and snapped to a smile and an Islamic greeting. Whether through consent or fear was impossible to read on the faces of villages who were rarely allowed glimpses of us, except at favored stops and safe houses...

All this makes me hope that the US and NATO militaries have well-developed "Emergency Plans" for the consolidation and subsequent evacuation of the units that have been spread so broadly throughout the whole of craggy Afghanistan over recent months. (Not least, because they were busy preparing for the election.)

But even more, I hope the Obama administration and its NATO allies have a political "Emergency Plan" for how they will ask the world's non-NATO big powers and Afghanistan's neighbors to help extricate them from this mess.

Of course, it will be quite normal for these other powers to require some kind of significant political quid pro quo for this.

... All this happening now, and tomorrow is another September 11...