Damaged Goods Left Behind in Afghanistan

We all like to get new gadgets, buy new vehicles & collect implements that make our lives easier. The shine of a new phone, the smell of a new car & the sound of a new machine always lifts us. However, as someone who spent the last few decades maintaining, repairing & restoring stuff, I am a firm believer that something that doesn’t work when needed, is as good as not there.

After overtaking Afghanistan, the Taliban were delighted to discover the spoils of war. Billions of dollars worth of military equipment left behind by the Americans & allies. From a sheer scale point of view, this made the Taliban the best-equipped terror group in the world. Reality hit when they realized that most of the higher-tech equipment like aircraft, helicopters & other weapon systems were rendered unserviceable before discarding them into the hands of the Taliban. 

While rudimentary small weapons like the Russian AKs hardly need any care, to keep a helicopter air-worthy or a radar/radio mission reliable is a technical & logistical ballet, pretty hard to master. 

One may wonder why anyone will leave such expensive & sophisticated war machinery on their way out of the battle zone, knowing fully well that it will find its way into the hands of the enemy? It all boils down to time & cost. While it took two decades to accumulate the equipment in Afghanistan, the decision to withdraw gave the allies just months to extricate soldiers, material & even afghans who were embedded into the operations. Pakistan had reaped many benefits extracting transit fees from over-land convoys supporting IASF till 2014 & the Americans thereafter, the same routes were not prudent for going back. Faced with the high cost & limited lift capacities of aircraft, it made more sense to leave the equipment behind than to haul it back.

While managing the lifecycle of any equipment, the decision to discard is quantified in terms of the economics of sustainment. Once inducted in the battlefield, the equipment value depreciates with use and if the cost of maintaining the system exceeds half of its residual value, it makes less sense to sustain the system. Media reports are full of coverage on damaged hardware left over by the American forces and how the Taliban must be regretting their premature celebrations on inheriting the latest war toys. As of now, it appears that the Taliban has limited capacity to make these weapon systems fit-for-use, but I would not disregard the ingenuity of self-taught technicians in innovating repairs. They may not be Tony Stark, but the influence of places like Darra Adam Khel is always lurking.

The disintegration of the USSR taught us that weapon stockpiles coupled with crippled economies make perfect targets for weapons trafficking. The situation in Afghanistan & the unfastened control of various Taliban warlords gives a direct pipeline for Pakistan to do what it does best. Export terror. 

At a very broad level, military logistics is a system of activities, capabilities & processes that connect a nation’s economy to the battlefield. The outcome of this process is the establishment of a ‘well’ from which the forces draw their combat potential. It is certainly an expensive well.  Obsessed with ruling through the barrel of a gun, the Taliban leadership will dedicate substantial resources to operationalize the military equipment & infrastructure sidelining national needs expected from governments. It remains to be seen who moves into this business with the Taliban since the real value of any conflict is the debt that it produces. 

The Americans may have lost a big stockpile of hardware, but from a simple cost-benefit, they gained a trouble-free exit while their opposite side was rejoicing the illusion of gains. Smaller weapons that were taken over do not pose any major threat to the west and a peaceful Afghanistan is far too complicated a game. But in the optics of it all, the US not only displaced Russians as the last empire to retreat from Afghanistan but also changed the image of terror from a traditionally dressed man holding an AK-47 to a Taliban in modern combat gear holding an M4. Sometimes we are collateral damage in our war against ourselves.

What is 'not' being said on Afghanistan

For thousands of years, life in Afghanistan flourished. Geography dictated lifestyles with vast valleys and barren stretches, grouping tribes with different takes on living. The imposition of modern social constructs started with this collection of tribal identities being defined in the boundary of the nation-state of Afghanistan. Empires thereafter tried their best to ‘manage’ this landlocked place, only to add entropy and leave. Today, the world is live-viewing a human calamity with the Afghans having the illusion of freedom as a choice.  

In a very cold and callous way, countries are doing in / for Afghanistan whatever is necessary (for them). It may be an over-simplification, but this simple statement can be injected with reality when we start defining ‘necessary’. Certainly, Peru is not in the field, but the customary suspects of the ‘perpetual great game’, are. The US, et al left because they did not want to focus on winning a game that will soon become irrelevant to domestic politics. Russia played the silent watch game, waiting for someone to remove them from the unwanted position of the last empire buried in Afghanistan. Pakistan gained from war profiteering in its Strategic Depth & its master China is now looking at an unavoidable involvement, even if just to prove that it is a superpower. 

It seems to be a checklist of superpower-ship; amassed wealth, powerful military, interventionist policies & involvement in Afghanistan. The Chinese hope not to repeat the mistakes of the Greeks, the Mongols, the British, the Soviets, and finally the Americans and their allies, but new mistakes will still be mistakes. If Afghanistan sinks into chaos, it could become a serious obstacle on the way to a stable and secure "Silk Road", China’s global infrastructure development strategy. Beyond serving as a sanctuary for anti-Western terrorists, unruly Muslim fundamentalists in power in Kabul might be eager to support the Uighur cause in China.

Stakeholders like United States, China, India, and Russia articulate two interests that justify allocating resources to stabilize Afghanistan:

• Preventing terrorist groups from establishing secure bases

• Promoting the economic rise of continental South Asia by securing investments in connectivity and integrating Afghanistan into those networks. (BRI, Rare-earths etc)

The best way to realize both of these objectives is to establish an effective state in Afghanistan, which raises the question of who will build it, pay for it, and fight for it. Taliban doesn’t seem to emerge as an answer to these questions. Even historically, No Afghan ruler or government has been able to build and sustain a state within its territory using solely domestic resources. The presence of foreign donors or security providers, as well as economic cooperation with some neighbours, can threaten other regional players.  While the stabilization of Afghanistan produces a partial public good for the international community, the actors who establish such stability eventually exploit the position they acquire in their own interest. Both the Soviets in the 1980s and the US since 2001 intended to “stabilize” Afghanistan in ways consistent with their interests. But rivals and adversaries such as Pakistan and Iran, the United States (against the Soviets), China (likewise), and Russia (versus the United States), perceived their efforts as threatening, even when those states also benefited from the limited stability imposed by the foreign presence.

Given Afghanistan’s economic and demographic profile as well as its linguistic, religious, ethnic, and economic links to neighbouring countries, virtually any neighbour or great power can destabilize the country at minimal cost by offering benefits to clients willing to fight. So how do you find common ground when the vector sum of individual interests is zero? Should the world let the Afghans find their path? 

It is too early to conclude the analysis. For now, away from the news, one might like to focus on what is ‘not’ being said on Afghanistan:

• China’s diplomatic dealings with Taliban

• Race for the Lithium deposits

• How the Taliban allowed all western (enemy)  military personnel to leave, unharmed.

• Should UNAMA now consider peacekeeping 

• Indo-Afghanistan trade through Chabahar

• Will the Taliban remain contended with Afghanistan or will they……

And finally, Pakistan. What new play does that bewilderment of a nation have to ensure that it continues to extort rent threatening its own collapse?

To Be Contd.....

Messaging in Troubled Times

The second wave amplified the lessons of the first. Some were learned. Some were not. Most were forgotten. There might be a shortage of medical supplies & many other things, but information overdose is a reality.

 Earlier, information sources were in the custody of a few then web 2.0 made everyone a ‘seeder & a leacher’ of information online. This democratized information but skewed data-to-noise ratio. There is a certain alienation in digital communication. Not being fact to face, delayed feedback, devoid of non-verbal aspects and easy anonymity are a few of the parts that take the feel away.

 Groups on community messaging services like WhatsApp, following on social media platforms like Instagram & Twitter etc make joining any conversation possible. The urge is understood but not bereft of responsibility. Platforms are full of false info, tangential conclusions and utter noise masking the critical factual data. The ‘Pandemic’ is now accompanied by the ‘Infodemic’.

 In the pandemic, people have been marked, stereotyped, discriminated against, viewed negatively, and suffered status loss due to a perceived contact with a disease. In addition, high levels of stress and anxiety was experienced by people due to significant changes in their day-to-day life, social structures and movements. To top that, information professing helplessness & fear might be a good ploy to sell products or modify offline behaviour, but is certainly not aligned to a nationally beneficial perspective.

 Did we get hit again? Yes! Is someone at fault? Yes! But purely in the realm of information management, the most important factor is to empower the people with the right information. Sadly, it is complex to be simple.

 Effective communication is proactive, polite, imaginative, innovative, creative, constructive, professional, progressive, energetic, enabling, transparent and technology-friendly. However, there are multiple factors playing a key role in accepting information, like social and cultural characteristics. Gender, generational contrasts, language inclinations, strict convictions, religious beliefs, and varying literacy influence the action of the masses. To package information in a way that it presents the needed facts, in time & conveyed in a way that it gets accepted and acted upon is the big win. This is the integral job of all the official Twitter handles, Facebook pages etc and they need to be manned by specialists who can keep up with technology & calamity.

 Information on oxygen shortage clutters information on oxygen availability. It would be prudent to have a setup informing the reality of medical support availability and even availability of first-care information on how to approach symptoms. Today, it is crowdsourcing that is the real source of info, a simple analytic tool can converge feeds, mine info and make user data available.

 Communicating responsibly is everyone’s job. Highlighting ills is important but so is selling hope. And somewhere in between lies the need of plain information away from all the padding of politics, marketing, greed & sometimes just habits. Crisis response communication setups are the need of the hour. They need not necessarily be government-run. The setup will encompass manpower, hardware, technology and cross-departmental chain-linking. Private players can add value, incorporate innovation & be commercially viable for long-term sustenance & growth. Data integrity & security can always be imposed based on law-of-the-land info governance.

 Deaths due to covid are human statistics & not just numbers. The narrative controls have blurred all responsibilities. From the originators, the spreaders, the faulty planners & opportunity grabbers to everyone who has been an accomplice in “forwarded as received” acts. The need for a specialist information dissemination mechanism is as critical as the spread of the virus.

Hope feels that this pandemic will be over soon, but it might not be our last. There are many things that we need to get right, information management is vital as it will always be the common thread, whatever the next wave or type of calamity be.