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Swat a year on
Talking about Swat, the Christian Science Monitor's Issam Ahmed has a nice feature out of Swat on how the region is doing a year after the government decided to kick out the militants.
"Nine months after Pakistan's military cleared the Swat Valley of a brutal Taliban occupation, the region has made steady gains in improving security and rebuilding infrastructure. But its progress remains vulnerable, threatened by sporadic militant attacks, stilted economic recovery, and growing frustration among residents at the strong military presence"
For me, this underscores the point that a military operation is just the start of a government's commitment when it decides to deal with militants who have set up shop on its territory.
The article also gives you a hint as to why the U.S. military is helping the Pakistanis with counterinsurgency:
"Haider Ali, a school principal in Mingora, complains about some soldiers' arbitrary and arrogant behavior. "They will enter our buildings to use the toilets without permission, they will eye our women while searching cars. Things will not be alright until they leave," he says."
Apparently the main
Apparently the main association that your average Pakistani or Afghani village makes with the "native police forces" is extortion of one kind or the other. Food, money, opium - the police force acts to tax all commerce in the region, taking it as their rightful "protection money."
This is a historical viewpoint: police mean extortion.
There's only one way out of it, but the PR folks don't like it. That's to give direct aid to villagers - not necessarily money, but rather farming equipment, tools and the like. Robust solar panels and water pumps for irrigation are going to win far more friends than schools or clinic ever will. (One top priority, by the way, is to ensure that the fertilizer that goes to farmers is in a chemical form that precludes use as an explosive component.)
This is the economic-ecological approach to stability in a region - take care of the basics, and then you can leave - and yes, we will be leaving - knowing that there is some economic stability in place.
For more:
IMPACT OF WAR IN SWAT VALLEY ON
FARMING SECTOR
By
Fazal Maula Zahid
(April 2009)
http://www.airra.org/home/
1) Lost crop production: Rs 7914 million (US $172 million)
2) Destroyed orchards: Rs 1000 million (US $21 million)
3) War-related unemployment: Rs 1600 million (US $34 million)
4) War-related displacement losses: Rs 7458 million ($165 million)
Now, how has the fraud-riven reconstruction program in Afghanistan handled this? What happened to the $10 billion or so sent to Pakistan for war-related reconstruction? Who is doing the accounting here?
October 6th, 2006 Contractors in Afghanistan are making big money for bad work
Massive open-ended contracts have been granted without competitive bidding or with limited competition to many of the same politically connected corporations which are doing similar work in Iraq: Kellogg, Brown & Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton), DynCorp, Blackwater, The Louis Berger Group, The Rendon Group and many more. Engineers, consultants, and mercenaries make as much as $1,000 a day, while the Afghans they employ make $5 per day.
If that hasn't been fixed, then the whole Afghanistan project is nothing but an expensive joke. Give equipment & materials directly to villagers and don't deal with shady contractors - otherwise, pack the whole thing up and leave before you make any more enemies.
In reality, reforming the
In reality, reforming the military contracting system will likely be a necessary first step:
Military mentors paid well for advice, USA TODAY 12/15/2009
In a little-known practice, the military pays retired generals and admirals to help run wargames and offer advice. Many of those advisers also work for the defense industry. In their role as "senior mentors," some of the former officers are paid as much as $340 an hour, or more than triple their rate of pay as high-level, active-duty officers. Some earn even more as consultants and board members of defense companies. The military has never released a full list of the mentors, and it does not collect details on their outside financial interests. Through data obtained from the services and other public records, USA TODAY identified 158 senior mentors, who are listed in the chart below.
Of that number, 80% had financial ties to defense contractors, according to public records and interviews, including 29 who were full-time executives of defense companies. Playing those dual roles is not prohibited by law or regulation.
Hence, if the military is getting advice from a retired general on the board of an engineering firm seeking reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan - what else do you need to know? Fraud, ripoffs, waste - yes, that's to be expected when cronyism is running the show.
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A page from the research
A page from the research paper ' Impact of war in swat valley on farming sector' is reproduced for the interest of friends.
THE BEUATY OF THE VALLEY IS NOW IRRIGATED BY BLOOD OF INNCOCENT
“The people of Swat are an extremely good looking people, and of a much more demure nature than most Pakhtuns, who are known to be boisterous”, writes an academic Fasi Zaka on February 12, 2009 who visited Swat valley in connection with a study in the area during peace times, while commenting on the present situation, later on. The writer says, “Several years after the completion of my education I went to Swat on a research project for the first and last time looking into the value chain of apple growers for the export market. I met many farmers, intelligent family men who were seeing hard times in agriculture but were optimistic about the future. Despite their hardships, they conformed to the gentleman farmer mould. If you had asked me at the time what would be the main concerns of Swat several years into the future I would have said it was the decimation of the population of bees due to pollution that was affecting the pollination of fruit-bearing trees. How wrong I was.”
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