Bribery, bullets and battlefield death in Afghanistan

There's a huge scandal brewing in NATO, where the Times newspaper has published an exposé claiming that Italian forces in the Allied coalition in Afghanistan have been systematically bribing their Taleban opposition, rather than fighting them. It's claimed that their failure to alert French forces to their 'arrangement' led to catastrophic consequences.

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified.

Their revulsion increased with the news that many of the dead soldiers had been mutilated — and with the publication of photographs showing the militants triumphantly sporting their victims’ flak jackets and weapons. The French had been in charge of the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, for only a month, taking over from the Italians; it was one of the biggest single losses of life by Nato forces in Afghanistan.

What the grieving nation did not know was that in the months before the French soldiers arrived in mid-2008, the Italian secret service had been paying tens of thousands of dollars to Taleban commanders and local warlords to keep the area quiet, The Times has learnt. The clandestine payments, whose existence was hidden from the incoming French forces, were disclosed by Western military officials.

US intelligence officials were flabbergasted when they found out through intercepted telephone conversations that the Italians had also been buying off militants, notably in Herat province in the far west. In June 2008, several weeks before the ambush, the US Ambassador in Rome made a démarche, or diplomatic protest, to the Berlusconi Government over allegations concerning the tactic.

However, a number of high-ranking officers in Nato have told The Times that payments were subsequently discovered to have been made in the Sarobi area as well.

Western officials say that because the French knew nothing of the payments they made a catastrophically incorrect threat assessment.

“One cannot be too doctrinaire about these things,” a senior Nato officer in Kabul said. “It might well make sense to buy off local groups and use non-violence to keep violence down. But it is madness to do so and not inform your allies.”

There's more at the link.

Italian officials have angrily denied the report, but I don't think the Times would have published it unless it were very sure of its facts. I imagine that a number of very angry senior officers from other Allied contingents in Afghanistan might have agreed to 'leak' the necessary information, in order to make sure that the Italians were called to account for what they'd done.

Of course, bribing the tribal opposition in Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province of British India was a time-honored practice (and has been continued by local powers after independence). I'm sure that if the NATO alliance could figure out how to get the Taleban to 'stay bribed', and not take their money, then turn around and continue their depredations, they'd probably prefer to send money to Afghanistan rather than troops. However, as Rudyard Kipling pointed out so famously:

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

(OK, the Afghan tribes might look, sound and dress rather differently to the ancient Vikings, but both groups were renowned warriors: and the consequences of 'paying them off' have proved to be pretty similar -i.e. equally disastrous! - down the centuries.)




I've written before about the growing complications of the Afghan situation, and most recently called for a re-evaluation of why we're there, what we want to achieve, and whether it can, in fact, be achieved at all. I'm afraid that when our own allies start to bribe their way out of trouble, rather than act as allies should, the need for such a re-evaluation becomes even more urgent. What if we end up - probably along with the British - as the only occupying forces not bribing the Taleban?

President Obama seems to be dragging his feet on the war in Afghanistan. If even this crisis doesn't show him the need for swift, decisive action, I hate to think how many more of our men and women in uniform are going to die or be maimed for the sake of his political sensitivities . . .

Peter