The Failure Of Afghanistan

I’m alway on alert for stories and reports about how things are going in Afghanistan. We hardly ever hear anything about how things are going over there since the invasion of Iraq started and, yet, supposedly, Afghanistan is really where all of this War on Terror stuff started. At the very least, Afghanistan is where the Taliban and Osama Bin Ladin was after 9-11. And we did a lot of bragging in the early days about how we were bringing them freedom and democracy and how we were going to rebuild the country. Remember all of that?

Now, Afghanistan hardly gets a mention in the news. Even when they had elections, it wasn’t even one of our top stories. Iraq has taken over our lives. Afghanistan is the forgotten bastard child. Kind of a shame really because apparently a lot has been happening while we weren’t looking.

Parliamentary elections last fall, hailed as free and fair–or at least as free and fair as anyone could expect in a place like Afghanistan–have allowed many Western observers to regard the nation-building process here as a success. In Kandahar, those elections were considered a joke–even by the people who won. Less than a quarter of the population voted, and, as most locals predicted, the counting process functioned like a bazaar with plenty of extra zeros for sale.

In reality, the four years since the Taliban’s demise have been characterized by a steady erosion of security in distinct phases. The most recent phase, signaled by the rebuffs I received from the farmers, may represent a point of no return. These rebuffs are the consequence of a highly effective intimidation campaign that has been carried out in tightening circles around Kandahar by, for lack of a better term, resurgent Taliban. Handbills appear in village mosques threatening anyone who dares collaborate with foreigners or the Afghan government. Homes receive armed visitors, demanding provisions or other assistance. One of my farmer friends, afraid even to pronounce their name, refers to them as “fairies who come at night.”

[…]

The Afghan government’s response to these developments has been characteristically weak. Despite a change in governors in Kandahar, provincial officials and security forces continue to act as predators, amassing money and power, treating inhabitants like dirt rather than serving and protecting them. What villagers here need is a reliable police force that knows the ways of the countryside, patrols regularly, treats people with respect, and protects them. “Community policing” is the American term for it. Instead, the Afghan security forces have adopted a war-fighting mentality from their American mentors and sally forth on occasional raids, the soldiers sporting dark glasses and hostile attitudes. Then they return to town, leaving the people alone to deal with the consequences, at the hands of the “fairies who come at night.”

U.S. officials are practically ignorant of this silent advance of fear. And their response to the exposed tip of the iceberg–open violence–has been misguided. Despite tough proclamations and battles against so-called insurgents in isolated valleys, U.S. military and civilian officials remain obsessed with “Al Qaeda” and any possible manifestations of an Osama bin Laden-style, ideological confrontation. This concern acts as a set of blinkers, blinding Americans to the real problems in Afghanistan and vastly contributing to the Afghans’ disillusionment.

The fact is, except in a training capacity, Al Qaeda hardly has any presence here. This is logical: Why would Al Qaeda send Arab or Chechen operatives to notoriously chauvinistic southern Afghanistan, which hated the domineering Arabs when they were guests of the Taliban, and where foreigners stick out like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? For ideological combat against the West, Iraq is a far more convenient and penetrable battleground, which is one reason why countless more Americans die there than in Afghanistan.

Even the “suicide bombings” in Afghanistan that have garnered mentions in the Western press of late are often something else. In one case I investigated carefully–the target, an Afghan official, was a friend of mine–much evidence contradicted the notion that the attack was a suicide bombing, as it was immediately labeled: the condition of my friend’s body, the type and location of the survivors’ wounds, and eyewitness descriptions. Everything pointed to a remote-controlled mine planted ahead of time. But no Afghan or U.S. official bothered to collect this evidence or to examine it seriously when it was presented to them.

Why such sloppiness? Because the terrorist suicide bombing explanation suits everyone. Americans are comfortable spending their resources searching for the Al Qaeda bogeyman; the real perpetrators take cover behind the Al Qaeda label; and Afghan officials are absolved of complicity or incompetence and the responsibility to properly investigate.

The steadily worsening situation in southern Afghanistan is not the work of some ineffable Al Qaeda nebula. It is the result of the real depredations of the corrupt and predatory government officials whom the United States ushered into power in 2001, supposedly to help fight Al Qaeda, and has assiduously maintained in power since, along with an “insurgency” manufactured whole cloth across the border in Pakistan–a U.S. ally. The evidence of this connection is abundant: Taliban leaders strut openly around Quetta, Pakistan, where they are provided with offices and government-issued weapons authorization cards; Pakistani army officers are detailed to Taliban training camps; and Pakistani border guards constantly wave self-proclaimed Taliban through checkpoints into Afghanistan.

But beleaguered Afghans have a hard time getting U.S. political and military officials to focus on these two factors, which feed on each other. U.S. personnel cling to the fictions that Afghans are responsible for the local officials who rule over them–despite the overwhelming moral and material support the United States has provided these officials–and that the Pakistani government is cooperating in the war on terror. And so the Afghan villagers, frightened, vulnerable, and disillusioned, are obliged to come to terms with the “fairies who come at night.”

This state of affairs is so bewildering that Kandaharis have reached an astonishing conclusion: The United States must be in league with the Taliban. They reason that America, with its power and riches, could bring an end to the “insurgency” in a month, if it so chose. They figure that America remains a close and munificent ally of Pakistan, the country that is sponsoring the “insurgency,” and so the continuing violence must be a deliberate element of U.S. policy. The point is not whether there is any factual basis for this notion, it’s that everyone here believes it. In other words, in a stunning irony, much of this city, the Taliban’s former stronghold, is disgusted with the Americans not because of their Western culture, but because of their apparent complicity with Islamist extremists.

A closed circuit of shortsighted policies has brought the United States to this pass: All other goals, such as democracy and reconstruction, have been consistently subordinated to the obsession with Al Qaeda, despite lip service to the contrary. Until U.S. decision makers change course and take responsibility for the situation they have created; until they demand accountability from the provincial officials they ushered into power; until they provide material support to those Afghans brave enough to assist them; until they react as strongly to the death of a respected Afghan official as to a grenade lobbed at a military convoy, the ring of fear will continue to close in on Kandahar, until, as residents are now predicting, the city is at war again. [“Afghanistan: The night fairies” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)]

(Emphasis by me.)
Afghanistan is crying out for attention. Are we going to wait until another disaster of thousands of lives happens before we wake up and pay attention? This is a mess we’ve helped to create. We must pull up our pants, roll up our sleeves and dig in and get dirty and help the Afghan people.

tags: Afghanistan, Freedoms, Democracy, Taliban, Kandahar, Pakistan, al-Qaeda

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