Declassified Document Of The Week

H/T to Unredacted at the National Security Archive for a very timely find on this week's Document Friday.

It's a State Department INR memo to the SecState dated November 7, 2001, reporting that "urban Pakistanis" polled immediately after 9/11 supported the Taliban regime in Afghanistan at greater levels than before. In fact, almost half of respondents favored increasing support to the Taliban.

The survey was conducted amongst “urban Pakistanis,” beginning “shortly after September 11″ 2001 and “almost all interviews” were conducted before the United States started bombing Afghanistan. In other words, the window that a westerner would assume that Pakistanis would probably have had the absolute lowest amount of support for the Taliban.

Not the case. The survey asked: “As you may know, our [Pakistani] government has been generally supportive of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. In the future, would you like to see our government strengthen its support for the Taliban, reduce its support, or maintain support for the Taliban at about the same level as now?”

The vast majority –46 percent– favored “increasing support for Mullah Omar’s regime.” Only a paltry 14 percent favored reducing support. The INR concluded that the Pakistani public “saw the Taliban more favorably than it had before the September 11 attacks.” And that Pakistanis “believed by a sizable majority that the Taliban are not a threat to stability in the region and that Pakistan’s ties with the Taliban are good.”

In a week when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff accused the Pakistani government of supporting the Afghan Taliban, it is sobering to realize how deep and pervasive popular support for the Taliban runs in Pakistan.

A Plague On Both Your Houses

The New York Times had a story from Afghanistan a couple days ago that should make even the most optimist nation-builder give up on the place. It's just too foreign to succumb to our Three Cups of Tea blandishments.

The story is a standard Romeo and Juliet tale, except it happened in Herat rather than Verona, and it has a couple of plot twists that Shakespeare couldn't have imagined.

In Afghanistan, Rage at Young Lovers:

HERAT, Afghanistan — The two teenagers met inside an ice cream factory through darting glances before roll call, murmured hellos as supervisors looked away and, finally, a phone number folded up and tossed discreetly onto the workroom floor.

It was the beginning of an Afghan love story that flouted dominant traditions of arranged marriages and close family scrutiny, a romance between two teenagers of different ethnicities that tested a village’s tolerance for more modern whims of the heart. The results were delivered with brutal speed.

This month, a group of men spotted the couple riding together in a car, yanked them into the road and began to interrogate the boy and girl. Why were they together? What right had they? An angry crowd of 300 surged around them, calling them adulterers and demanding that they be stoned to death or hanged.

When security forces swooped in and rescued the couple, the mob’s anger exploded. They overwhelmed the local police, set fire to cars and stormed a police station six miles from the center of Herat, raising questions about the strength of law in a corner of western Afghanistan and in one of the first cities that has made the formal transition to Afghan-led security.

-- snip --

Ms. Mohammedi’s uncle visited her in jail to say she had shamed the family, and promised that they would kill her once she was released. Her father, an illiterate laborer who works in Iran, sorrowfully concurred. He cried during two visits to the jail, saying almost nothing to his daughter. Blood, he said, was perhaps the only way out.

“What we would ask is that the government should kill both of them,” said the father, Kher Mohammed.

-- snip --

The case has resonated in Herat, in part because it stirred memories of a brutal stoning ordered by the Taliban last summer in northern Afghanistan.

A young couple in Kunduz was stoned to death by scores of people — including family members — after they eloped. The stoning marked a brutal application of Shariah law, captured on a video recording released online months later. Afghan officials promised to investigate after an international outcry, but no one has faced criminal charges.

The NYT makes the point that the legal system in Herat, and officialdom there generally, is treating the star crossed lovers pretty leniently. Even the clergy is not the problem, since "top clerics" have not condemned them. Rather, it's the Capulets and the Montegues themselves - well, the Tajiks and the Hazaras, but you have to dig down to paragraph 21 of 30 before the story reveals the identities of the parties - who want to kill their own children.

Suraya Pakzad [director of Voices of Women Organization, which operates the only women’s shelter in the Herat province] said most of the women and girls in the shelters of western Afghanistan had fled forced or abusive marriages, or had been ostracized from their communities for dating young men without their families’ approval. Male relatives often punish such transgressions with beatings or death.

But in separate interviews at the juvenile jail, Ms. Mohammedi and Mr. Mohammed said they had not worried about such things.

He did not think about the rage that would erupt if a young Tajik man picked up a Hazara girl in a neighborhood dominated by conservative Hazaras, members of one of Afghanistan’s many ethnic minorities. “It’s the heart,” Mr. Mohammed said. “When you love somebody, you don’t ask who she is or what she is. You just go for it.”

-- snip --

They now spend the days at opposite ends of the same juvenile jail, out of each other’s sight. Mr. Mohammed nurses the wounds still visible in his swollen face and blood-laced eyes, and Ms. Mohammedi has been going to classes and learning to tailor clothes.

Both say they want to be together, but there are complications. Family members of the man killed in the riot sent word to Ms. Mohammedi that she bears the blame for his death. But they offered her an out: Marry one of their other sons, and her debt would be paid.

Even assuming that nation-building is possible in a multinational state like Afghanistan, which I don't, it would still not change the deep cultural beliefs and practices that are on display here.

Romeo and Juliet always die in the end, which is the point of the play.

"These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume." - Romeo and Juliet, 2.3

Holbrooke Surfaces

Ask, and ye shall receive. The day before yesterday I wondered what had happened to Richard Holbrooke, and today he turned up giving an on-the-record press briefing at the State Department.

His answer to the press corps's first question included what may have been either a transcription error or a Freudian slip:

And for those of you who haven’t followed this as carefully as [questioner Daniel Dombey of the Financial Times] did, I want to be very clear: There were different kinds of programs we have in Afghanistan, and some of them ... have proceeded without any effect.

Just as I'd feared.

Where in the World is Richard Holbrooke?

The Washington Times has an interesting story about the curious absence from public view of Richard Holbrooke, United States Special Envoy on Pakistan and Afghanistan. What could be the cause of this low profile, especially for a public figure who is "known for his love of the press?"

President Obama called Richard Holbrooke "one of the most talented diplomats of his generation" when he named the globe-trotting foreign policy expert to be special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But 10 months later, Mr. Holbrooke was anchored in Washington and far from the front lines of diplomacy that led to Tuesday's Afghan election deal.

The Obama administration used other intermediaries to apply the pressure that got Afghan President Hamid Karzai to agree to a runoff after fraud-tainted elections.

And when Mr. Obama praised his diplomatic team for its success, Mr. Holbrooke's name was pointedly missing. There was high praise for U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry and "great congratulations" to Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, who met with Mr. Karzai.

Could Holbrooke be the scapegoat for an administration that has no path forward on Afghanistan?

Mr. [Steve] Clemons [executive vice president at the New America Foundation who runs a popular foreign policy blog, The Washington Note] said Mr. Holbrooke is being made a fall guy for an "absence of presidential vision and clarity."

"Holbrooke was loyal to the vision that Obama laid out last March, which proved to be an ineffective, incomplete and semidisconnected [vision]," Mr. Clemons said. "Some people are trying to pin on Richard the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and the relationship with Karzai, but all of that was deteriorating before."

It must be a great comfort for Mr. Holbrooke to have a friend and supporter like Steve Clemons who will defend him when he can't speak to the press for himself.

I see that the Board of Directors of Mr. Clemons's New America Foundation includes Kati Marton, an author and journalist (whose book about the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, A Death in Jerusalem, I highly recommend, BTW). Kati Marton also happens to be the wife of the curiously quiet Richard Holbrooke.

I get the feeling that Steve Clemons will be channeling a lot of Richard Holbrooke's thoughts in the coming months.