April 2017 – Millisphere

Millisphere, abstract noun. A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population – around seven million people, but anywhere between 3.5 and 14 million people will do.

Afghanistan, with a population of 33 million, is made up of four or five millispheres. The city of Kabul, now over 3.5 million, qualifies as an urban millisphere; its economy dependent on cash flow from the US. To the northeast of Kabul is the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance millisphere of Mazar-e-Sharif, to the southeast, the millisphere I will call “Pashtunistan”; its capital Kandahar.

There are nearly 14 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan, the majority in Pashtunistan, and another 40 million Pashtuns live across the border in Pakistan.

When my friends John and Miranda passed through on the “hippie trail” in 1971, Kabul had a population of less than one million. Travelling by bus down the Kabul river, through Jalalabad to Pakistan, they said the Khyber Pass (through the White Mountains) was a bit like the Manawatu Gorge, in New Zealand, only drier. John, who remembers seeing a lot of forts, thought the Pashtuns were a proud people.

On April 13, 2017, the United States dropped a GBU-43/B MOAB (aka the mother of all bombs) on caves in the Achin district of Pashtunistan; not far from the Tora Bora caves, where the US had briefly cornered Osama bin Laden in December 2001.

Costing $US16 million, the MOAB is equivalent to 10 tons of TNT. Reputedly dropped in retaliation for the killing of a Green Beret sergeant in the area the previous Sunday, it was part of an increased effort by US special forces in the east of Afghanistan against Sunni/Pashtun tribes targeting the Shi’a minority in Kabul.

The Achin district is almost 100 percent Shinwari, a sub-tribe of the Pashtun Kasi tribe. One such Kasi was Mir Qasi. Born in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan in 1964, Qasi picked up forged papers in Karachi and bought a fake green card in Miami before investing in a courier firm in Langley, Virginia where he worked as a courier driver – familiarising himself with the entrances to the CIA HQ.

In 1993 Qasi bought himself a Chinese-made AK-47 at a Langley gun shop, pulled into the CIA entrance and killed two and wounded three CIA operatives.

Qasi fled to Pakistan but was traced to Pashtunistan. With a sizable reward on his head, he was lured by informants into Pakistan, where he was captured by the FBI. Found guilty in the USA and executed by lethal injection, his body was repatriated to Pakistan. Qasi’s funeral was attended by the entire civil hierarchy of Balochistan.

The military history of Pashtunistan is a story of asymmetrical warfare. The British Empire in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th century had both come out of Pashtunistan badly bloodied, now it is the American Empire’s turn to “dominate” the Pashtuns.

In October 2013, Hakimullah Mehsud, the Pashtun chief of the Pakistan Taliban, was killed outside a mosque by a US drone in Waziristan, another Pashtun millisphere. Before his death Mehsud and his fighters had forced the closure of the Khyber Pass six times. Mesud was targeted because he appeared in a photo with the Camp Chapman suicide-bomber, Humam al-Balawi.

Named after the first American casualty in Afghanistan, “Forward Operating Base Chapman” contained a CIA facility tasked with providing intelligence supporting drone strikes inside Pakistan.

A Jordanian doctor the US thought had turned informer against the Taliban, al-Balawi had used this trust to gain access to the Camp Chapman CIA compound unsearched. Disregarding the maxim “don’t bunch up”, the CIA gathered to “debrief” al-Balawi, who then detonated the suicide vest sewn into his tunic. Casualties included the CIA base chief, Jennifer Mathews, one of the US government’s then top experts on al-Qaeda.

Pakistan took the Mehsud case to the UN Security Council reiterating that “US drone strikes constituted a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, were a violation of humanitarian laws and a dangerous precedent in inter-state relations”.

After the April 13 MOAB bombing, Afghan president Ghani’s representative in Pakistan called the attack “reprehensible and counterproductive” and the previous president, and Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, said: “This not a war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons”.

The “shock and awe” of the “mother of all bombs” was designed to intimidate the enemy. History has shown that Pashtuns aren’t easily intimidated.

Mazar-e-Sharif

The publication, in New Zealand, of Hit & Run by Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson has drawn our attention to the remote Tigran valley, north of Kabul, in the millisphere of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Tigran is divided from Kabul by a high mountain range, and those wanting a description of the countryside should read Eric Newby’s travel writing classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

Tigran, in the Baghlan province, is situated on the historic trade route from Kabul north to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, but the New Zealand SAS wouldn’t have followed Newby’s horseback route; they would have taken a one-hour flight directly to Baghlan. Quicker and safer.

I discussed dividing Afghanistan into millispheres with a friend, who had worked for the Red Cross in Kabul in 1991.

Shew said Afghanistan had never really been one country, but a collection of regions dominated by ethnic warlords. For a start the country is roughly 85 percent Sunni Muslim and 15 percent Shi’a.

Kabul is the fifth fastest growing city in the world; a decade ago it didn’t qualify as a millisphere but now, with an urban population around 3.7 million, it does.

Kabul is roughly 45 percent Tajik, 25 percent Hazara and 25 percent Pashtun, and these three ethnic groups are spread throughout the country in roughly those proportions.

Baghlan province, where the NZ SAS Operation Burnham took place, is in a region dominated by the “northern alliance” of Tajiks and Uzbeks. Mazar-e-Sharif, after the largest city in the region, is the name I’ve given this millisphere, and geophysically it is the upper Amu Darya river catchment that drains north into the Aral Sea.

North is also the direction Afghanistan’s opium takes on its journey to the West.

When the Taliban seized control in 1996, opium production fell to less than 20 percent of what it was during the decade long 1980s Russian/Mujahideen war.

Since the American invasion in 2001, opium production has climbed to greater than pre-Taliban levels – despite the Americans spending $US7.6 billion on poppy eradication programmes.

During the Russian occupation, the Americans supplied money and arms to the Mujahideen. Joining this “jihad” against the Russians were 25,000 Arab fighters including one Osama bin Laden, who famously turned from being an ally of convenience to a sworn enemy of the US.

Working in Wellington earlier this decade, I met Monroe, a Maori soldier, who after serving his time in the New Zealand Army, signed up with the US-led ISAF and worked in Kabul, training Afghan armed forces.

His take on the situation was that only those on the bottom in Afghan society would sign up with the invaders. He called recruits “homos and junkies” whom he thought would never beat the Taliban.

It is estimated that the Taliban have only 25,000 farmer/fighters in the field. Despite a ratio of 12:1 in favour of the US and its allies, backed by sophisticated military equipment, the Taliban still control large areas of Afghanistan.

Before the Taliban, Baghlan province was controlled by the Hazara warlord Sadat Jafat Naderi who belongs to the Ismaili Shi’a sect which comprises about 20 percent of all Shi’a Muslims. There are about six million Ismaili Shi’a in Afghanistan and about 25 million worldwide.

The Ismaili Shi’a give their allegiance to the Aga Khan who, with a personal wealth of $US800 million, is one of the richest royals in the world. The current Aga Khan was born in Geneva to an English mother and lives in France.

The Taliban use asymmetrical warfare, such as suicide bombers, and their sanctuary over the border in the Pashtun tribal areas in Pakistan mean they are still a force to be reckoned with.

In the 4th century BC, Alexander the Great said: “May the Gods keep you away from the venom of the cobra, the teeth of the tiger, and the revenge of the Afghans”.

The New Zealand army lost four soldiers during its time in Afghanistan; Britain lost 450 and the Americans 2,300.

Should we have been there and identified as a ally of the American?

As the Dutch said before becoming one of the first Nato countries to bail out: “We came to help rebuild, not to take sides in a civil war”.

The Dutch also couldn’t stomach the corruption.