  Some Very Unfinished Business in Afghanistan (The following article is based on Arthur Kent's speech to the IdeaCity conference in Toronto, Wednesday June 19, 2002.) Spare a thought for Hamid Karzai. Having to embody his people's dream for a popularly elected national leader has turned out to be a very mixed blessing. No sooner did a Loya Jirga, or grand council, of his countrymen confirm the Western-backed interim leader of Afghanistan as head of state, than the assembly deteriorated into bitter wrangling over his choice of cabinet members. He has been forced to name as his vice-presidents three old warlords, throwbacks to the bloody civil war that enabled the Taliban to take power in 1996. That's three steps back, politically, after Karzai's step forward. The appointments underline the 'Mission Impossible' nature of Karzai's challenge. He has to somehow satisfy the ambitions of all of Afghanistan's hotly competitive ethnic and regional groups while guiding the war-ravaged nation towards free elections in 18 months time. But the President's predicament says much, much more about the failure of his foreign patrons -- the U.S. and the U.N. -- to follow through on their bold promises made during last autumn's military campaign to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda. It's been seven months since Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his cohorts fled to the hills. Yet he and his guest, Osama bin Laden, and most of their confederates, have not yet been run to ground. Worse, strategic failures and under-manning by U.S. war planners have created a dangerous vacuum of power throughout most of the Afghan countryside. Karzai's powers extend not much further than Kabul's city limits. And with a national army still little more than a work in progress, there is little prospect of improvement in the near future. This unsettling state of affairs is the result of some very basic, but predictable, failings on the part of the Bush administration and its coalition partners. For example: just how diligently did the international community try to secure Afghanistan ? Not very, if troop levels are anything to go by. Consider this: the 5,000 soldiers of ISAF, the international security force in Kabul, combined with 5,000 or so combat troops from Britain, Canada and other coalition countries, together with approximately 5,000 American combat troops, means that there are now about 15,000 Western troops in Afghanistan. Compare that with NATO's current numbers in the former Yugoslavia. There, around 57,000 soldiers -- nearly four times the Afghan deployment -- are still on the ground in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. That's four times as many troops in a region one-eighth the size of Afghanistan. And we wonder why so many al Qaeda and Taliban gunmen and their leaders have escaped? And why the interim government can't even write a parking ticket in cities like Herat, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Mazar-i-Sharif ? You've heard President George W. Bush and his spokesmen explain: America doesn't want to get 'bogged down' in Afghanistan. Bogged down. It's a byword, a mantra -- and it's a deception. The U.S. has been 'bogged down' in Afghanistan since the early 1980s, when the CIA conducted it's largest-ever covert support operation for the Afghan resistance to occupation of their country by the Soviet Union. The September 11th attacks were largely the result of the U.S. failing to 'de-bog down' itself in Afghanistan. This past autumn, a CIA case officer I encountered in the north of the country told me, 'We broke our own rules: always normalize the area after a conflict; consolidate your gains.' Instead, the West squandered the advantage gained by the Soviet retreat in 1989. Civil war and chaos followed, leading to the Taliban's rise to power. Is the same mistake being made now ? Sadly, it looks that way. True, ending the Taliban's misrule of the Afghan people was a major battle won. And having a new leader of Hamid Karzai's quality is a major plus. But has the Bush administration and its allies helped Karzai consolidate? Not if tangible, material help is anything to go by. Karzai has consistently asked for more U.N. or U.S. troops to bring some measure of order to the countryside and key provincial cities. But from the Bush administration, the answer has been a firm 'no.' Frustratingly, almost all of the billions of dollars in international aid promised Afghanistan at the Tokyo conference earlier this year is being held back by donor nations due to the lack of basic security. Old warlords cling to power in Kandahar, Herat, Jalalabad, Mazar and other cities, and do so by force of arms. Karzai is clever, and he's quickly learning to play the game of international power politics. His first request following his confirmation? He appealed to his foreign supporters: help us rebuild our roads. A public works project of this kind would bring much needed employment, but there will be no paving until law and order is brought to Afghanistan's major transport corridors. That means greater international military muscle. In effect, Karzai is challenging the West: so you've gone to war to end terror? Then help the people of Afghanistan finish the job. More than a million Afghan refugees have returned home since the Taliban regime's collapse. But they've done so on faith, trusting our nations to make good on all our promises to defeat terror and make the world -- including their part of the world -- safe for democracy. In reply, the Bush White House makes all the right noises. The President and his spokesmen intone another mantra: there must be an end to warlordism in Afghanistan. Surprising, then, that as soon as the Taliban collapsed, the C.I.A. begin to bankroll warlords they believe to be anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda. A congressional aide in Washington quipped: 'well, if we don't put our own troops on the ground, we have to rent someone else's. Just because it blew up in our faces before, don't expect us not to try it again.' Indeed the CIA seems to be hooked on blowback. Recently the agency accused a warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of plotting a coup against the interim government in Kabul. But Hekmatyar, more than any other party leader, received the most U.S. tax dollars during the C.I.A.'s arming of the Afghan Mujahideen against the Red Army. Another warlord, Jalaluddin Haqqani, has been added, recently, to the U.S. government's list of most-wanted terrorists. Haqqani is another strongman 'made' by CIA guns and money in the 1980s. Have American spymasters and generals learned from their mistakes ? Evidently not. Today, in the city of Gardez, just a few hours drive southwest of Kabul, a warlord named Pasha Khan Zadran has set himself up against the Western-backed government in the capital. Recently he rocketed the outskirts of Gardez, killing 30 civilians. President Hamid Karzai was outraged. He demanded that Pasha Khan be eliminated. But there's little chance of that happening: Pasha Khan Zadran is one of the warlords who rents his militiamen to the U.S. campaign, 600 of them. So does his rival, the pro-interim government leader Hakim Taniwal. The U.S. is funding both sides in Gardez. The cartwheel of corruption and black comedy keeps turning. I must stress that I'm speaking here about the Bush administration, about politicians and generals, not about Americans. Having worked and lived with Americans all my life, I can assure you they're people who really want to do the right and effective thing, both at home and abroad. But too often, America's good intentions don't filter up to their leaders, especially in foreign policy. The Bush administration shields itself by trying to equate criticism of its policies with treason. And that's what we've seen in Afghanistan: a flag, the stars and stripes, used as a blindfold; and following the collapse of the Taliban regime, the sending up of a smokescreen of triumph thick enough to hide even the fog of war. Fortunately there is another way. This is not a war that can be won with Cold War style military deterrence. It's a clash of ideas, of cultures. We have a better idea. The vast majority of people in the third and Muslim worlds lean in our direction. They crave peace, opportunity and progress. Why are we so slow to take up ideas, rather than arms? Yes, we've got to track down terrorists and stop them. Following the September 11th outrages, the West has had ample justification for conducting intense military and police operations. But just as urgently, we've got to stop the spread of the terrorists' poisonous ideals, block their recruitment of new followers. We've got to get on the ground in the third and Muslim worlds, diplomatically, politically, economically. We've got to parachute our creative forces behind the lines. We've got to work constructively with people there to steal the initiative from the zealots. Help them to replace corrupt bureaucracies and repressive governments, and to displace the madrassas, with their preaching of hate and violence, with progressive schools that teach the values of peace and freedom. Sadly, we haven't even started fighting on those fronts. And now the Bush administration wants us to take another shot at Saddam Hussein? No reasoned examination of the facts we've left on the ground in Afghanistan could allow such a mistake. George W. Bush delights in warning the world that the September 11th suicide attacks 'awoke a sleeping giant.' Sure, but it's genius we need now. The other countries of the so-called civilized world have got to step forward. They've got to shoulder their share of the responsibilities and demand a voice in formulating strategies and tactics. Otherwise the dismal results thus far will write the epitaph for our nations' response to terrorism. |