War Notes: October 28, 2009

In a sad story revealing the far reaches of the war in Afghanistan, eight Afghan refugees drowned when their raft sank en route to Greece from Turkey. Local officials believe the boat may have been part of a "clandestine human trafficking ring." The untold thousands who flee Afghanistan and Iraq as war refugees are easy fodder for sex and labor traffickers.

Jose Ramos-Horta, the president of East Timor and winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, pens a piece advocating the commencement of negotiations with the Taliban. Though generally an optimist on the future of Afghanistan, Ramos-Horta is a realistic on the current situation: "The Taliban is strong enough to make Afghanistan ungovernable for the U.S. indefinitely. Yet the U.S. is strong enough to keep the Taliban from ever cementing its hold on the country if Washington wants to do so." Ramos-Horta invokes the other unsavory people we negotiate with now- "Kim Jong Il of North Korea, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan or the military junta in Burma." I am all for negotiations, because like Ramos-Horta, I believe the Taliban would gladly take power back in exchange for turning on Al-Qaeda. My only concern is whether what we consider 'The Taliban' really speaks with one voice.

The U.S military clashed with Afghan government officials over the fight against drug trafficking. Fed up with drug cartels that act with virtual impunity, NATO forces have been given lists of traffickers to capture or kill. The Afghan government is not pleased with this arrangement, as it undermines their fledgling justice system. Afghanistan's Deputy Interior Minister, Mohammad Daud Daud noted, "They should respect our law, our constitution and our legal codes. We have a commitment to arrest these people on our own." Former Interior Minister Ali Jalali, added, "There is a constitutional problem here. A person is innocent unless proven guilty. If you go off to kill or capture them, how do you prove that they are really guilty in terms of legal process?" These conundrums demonstrate the difficulty, if not impossibility, of fighting a dangerous enemy and trying to create a civil society from scratch in the same place at the same time.