Why Afghanistan's politics are stranger than fiction

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has begun his second term with a pledge to end the fighting there but as Hugh Sykes reports the Pakistan connection makes this a deeply complex problem.

The Taliban came to prominence in Afghanistan in the autumn of 1994

"Fantastic, thrilling, unbelievable," says the blurb on the back cover of the airport thriller Unholy Madness.

The plot is a bit far-fetched. There is this force of Islamic fundamentalist fighters called the Taliban.

They have two branches - one in Pakistan, the other in Afghanistan.

The Pakistan Army is trying to defeat the local Taliban, who have been killing hundreds of people in Pakistani cities with suicide bombers and assaults by armed insurgents.

The Americans and the British have weighed in to help the fight against the Pakistan Taliban.

Meanwhile across the border to the west, the Afghan Taliban are killing American and British troops and they are supplied with weapons, vehicles and mobile phones from across the border in Pakistan, where the Afghan Taliban leadership is based.

So the Americans and the British are supporting a country, Pakistan, which has elements who are supporting the movement that is killing British and American troops.

You could not make it up.

And all I actually made up was the title, Unholy Madness.

The Afghan Taliban leadership are in Pakistan. Pakistan has failed to act against them. And they do kill British and American troops.

And the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says the US is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Pakistan.

From the point of view of an American or British soldier, though, that is pretty much the same as saying that the US is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the country that is supporting the enemy that is killing them.

War direction

This strange, convoluted scenario comes sharply into focus if you look at a map.

The main fighting areas in Afghanistan are in the south - near and around the city of Kandahar.

Just across the mountains, along a proper road, there is the Pakistani city of Quetta, where the Afghan Taliban ruling council, the Shura, are thought to spend much of their time - directing and supplying their war effort against the Americans and the British from a safe distance.

And Quetta is not in the ambiguous "tribal areas" - it is proper Pakistan; it is the capital of the fully-fledged Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

It would be entirely rational for Pakistan to support the Afghan Taliban - they have to hedge their bets.

The Taliban might rule Afghanistan again one day, and they need to have a good relationship with them, as they did before, when the Taliban were in power in Kabul.

Pakistan was one of the few countries to recognise the Taliban government - there was a Taliban embassy in Islamabad.

But it does mean American and British troops are being killed because Pakistan, in effect, has failed to shut down the Afghan Taliban supply lines from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

And looking at the map highlights another point - Afghanistan is landlocked.

The Americans and the British and the rest of ISAF - the International Stabilisation Assistance Force - get most of their supplies by road.

For years, lorries lumbering across the Khyber Pass with food, bottled water and groceries for the Western forces were attacked by the Taliban.

Now many more of those lorries are getting through untouched because security firms hired by the Americans and the British are paying the Taliban huge sums in protection money to let the lorries through.

And what do the Taliban do with the cash? They probably do not take holidays at beach hotels in Dubai.

So again, American and British soldiers are being killed with ammunition paid for, indirectly, with American and British money.

You could not make it up.

Miserable existence

Meanwhile, in Kabul, life hardly improves. Poverty in parts of the Afghan capital is almost medieval.

Begging is commonplace in poverty-stricken Kabul

"Old alms seekers with their seamy palms out-held and maimed beggars sad-eyed in rags and children asleep in the shadows with flies walking their dreamless eyes.

"Naked dogs that seem composed of bone entirely and small orphans abroad like irate dwarfs."

That is an extract from the novel Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy - king of bleak.

I was reading that passage in Afghanistan last week after an afternoon walking around the capital and I thought: "That's Kabul."

But he was describing Mexico City 150 years ago.

To complete the Kabul picture you simply need to add:

Children in rags tug at your coat and you fish out a battered Afghan note worth barely 50p.

Then there are 10 small children grabbing at your hand and you cannot get away because the children are blocking the pavement.

And the road is a stream of rainwater, sewage and mud.

A woman with a baby under her burka sees you giving money to the children and begs for some herself.

And when you say you have no more one small boy persists and walks with you for 20 minutes until you relent and your reward is a genuine smile of gratitude.

The daylight thickens into night and there are no street lights.

By the glow of a storm lantern men sift through second-hand clothes on a cart and try to pick out a good winter coat.

Meanwhile, a young man desperate for work weeps as he talks to me and through accusing tears says: "You've been here eight years now, and what have you done?

"Why is my country so miserable?"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8371037.stm

In Russia, New Times Are Reason for Debate

In Russia, New Times Are Reason for Debate

A fisherman in Vladivostok. The city is seven hours ahead of Moscow, which makes it hard to manage businesses.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

Published: December 6, 2009

MOSCOW — Vadim V. Vodyanitsky runs a fish processing plant in Russia’s Far East, and one question looms over his day, as crucial as the trawler schedules or the Pacific tidal patterns. What time is it in Moscow, 5,000 miles away?

A market in Khabarovsk, a city in Russia's Far East. The region is many time zones ahead of Moscow, and some want to shift the time closer.

There are many ways to measure Russia’s girth, but Mr. Vodyanitsky can speak to one of the most compelling: it has 11 time zones, from the Polish border to near Alaska, a system so vast that you can get a walloping case of jet lag from a domestic flight.

The time zones, set up by the Soviets to showcase the country’s size, have long been a source of national pride, but the government is now viewing them as a liability and is considering shedding some.

In today’s economy of constant communication, it is hard to manage businesses and other affairs when one region is waking up and another is thinking about dinner. Mr. Vodyanitsky, for example, has his plant on the Kamchatka Peninsula, nine hours ahead of Moscow, and his office in Vladivostok, seven hours ahead. But his business often depends on decisions by regulatory and banking officials in the capital. “It’s extremely inconvenient getting anything done through Moscow,” he said in a telephone interview. “For any activity, we often have to wait a day, wasting a whole 24 hours.”

Mr. Vodyanitsky, 35, favors reducing the time difference between the Far East and Moscow to ease the strain on industry, but others are not so sure. In fact, the issue has blossomed in recent days into an intense debate across the country about how Russians see themselves, about how the regions should relate to the center, about how to address the age-old problem of creating a sense of unity in this land.

Governments have long tinkered with time zones for political purposes, and at the other extreme from Russia stands China. After Mao and the Communists seized power in 1949, they tried to cement control by mandating one countrywide time zone.

Everyone in China is supposed to live on Beijing time, even though the country is wide enough to have as many as four or five time zones.

Nobody is seriously promoting the idea of a single time zone for Russia, which might lead to all sorts of absurdities (breakfast in the middle of the night in the Far East). But when President Dmitri A. Medvedev suggested last month that the country should contemplate scaling back the zones, he appeared to be offering support for proposals from senior officials in the Far East to trim the system by a few hours.

Mr. Medvedev emphasized that the government had not made a decision yet. But he indicated that revamping the time zones could play an important role in the push to modernize Russia’s economy.

Gennady I. Lazarev, a prominent Vladivostok academic who is a proponent of the change, said in an interview that Russia should undertake an experiment, shifting the Far East closer to Moscow by one hour, waiting a year to allow people to adapt, then moving another hour closer. Further changes would be more drastic but should be evaluated, he said.

“If the time differences were less, then Russia would be perceived by people as a more compact, more manageable place,” said Mr. Lazarev, who is also a governing party member of the regional legislature.

Mr. Lazarev said he believed that the Far East was already two hours off what he referred to as the correct biological time — meaning the time most appropriate for the human body’s internal clock.

The current system does have a crazy-quilt feel. For example, when it is noon in Vladivostok, it is 10 a.m. just over the border in China. In Tokyo, it is 11 a.m., even though Tokyo is farther east than Vladivostok.

Still, proposals to modify the time zones have stirred deep suspicions, especially in the Far East and Siberia, where people have long resented Moscow, much the way people in places like Idaho distrust the goings-on in Washington.

The Far East has a weak economy and a sparse and shrinking population. Residents there often complain about the lack of federal support.

Andrei Gordeyev, 25, an illustrator in Khabarovsk, the second most populous city in the Far East, said that by raising the issue of reducing the time zones, Mr. Medvedev was “throwing dust in our eyes,” an expression that implies an attempt to impress someone with something that in truth is of little value.

“They can say, ‘Oh, we are doing this to help the economy out there,’ ” Mr. Gordeyev said. “But the reality is that if they really want to help us, there are a lot of other, more significant things that they can do.” Others worried that shifting the time closer to Moscow might assist business and government but would hurt people’s well-being, forcing them to spend more of their waking hours in the dark. That factor is already critical in winter, when at the worst there are just a handful of daylight hours.

“We have to look at this from a biological standpoint, how it is going to affect health,” said Yekaterina Degtyareva, 27, a personnel manager who lives in Novosibirsk, the most populous city in Siberia, and often travels to the Far East and Moscow. “If it is going to be a centralized, so-called totalitarian decision, then nothing good will come of it.”

In his remarks last month, Mr. Medvedev mentioned that while the 11 time zones were often portrayed as “a vivid symbol of our country’s greatness,” that notion might need to be discarded.

Perhaps not, said Elia Kabanov, 26, director of a public relations agency in Novosibirsk.

“Eleven time zones — it is an endearing feature of Russia, part of our national idea, if you would,” Mr. Kabanov said. “It is something that distinguishes us from China or the U.S.A., and something that we need to preserve for future generations.”

But Mr. Vodyanitsky, the owner of the fish processing factory in the Far East, said the situation was increasingly untenable. He said the time difference not only caused inefficiencies, but also gave rise to estrangement between parts of Russia.

He said he regularly received calls at his office in the middle of the night from people in Moscow. “They have no idea that we are seven hours ahead in Vladivostok,” he said. “And they get outraged that I don’t answer my phone. They say, ‘How come you people are not working? What are you, lazy?’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/world/europe/07zones.html