On September 18 Ronald E. Neumann, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, went to the venerable Dost Mohammad Khan School in Kabul to observe the parliamentary voting taking place there. Named for the legendary king who preserved the country's independence from British imperialism in the 19th century, the antique, Western-style building lies nestled in the "Lion's Gate," the twin mountains that guard the southern approaches to the Afghan capital and witnessed the most brutal fighting during the civil war of the 1990s. As he emerged, the ambassador spoke to Chronogram about the significance of the battered nation's first legislative election since 1969.
"It's very significant in several ways," Neumann said. "The vote is going off generally peacefully, with the exception of a few violent incidents. There is a complete failure of fanatics and terrorists to provide an alternative to the democratic process. It represents a big step to building a stable, democratic and independent country, as well as providing greater security for everyone in the world, except for a few terrorists. The Afghan people seem to be doing just fine."
If the litmus test of this last assertion is taken to be the fulfillment of the terms of the December 2001 Bonn Agreement that followed the US-led overthrow of the Taliban in the wake of the September 11 attacks, it is technically correct. The holding of the parliamentary vote was the last of the four main provisions—Emergency and Constitutional loya jirgas, presidential and parliamentary elections—that sought to finally close the wound opened by the Soviet-led overthrow of Afghanistan's progressive government in 1978, a trauma that widened into foreign invasion, civil war, terrorist infiltration, and culminated in the global "war on terror."
But what does this mean in practical terms? Are these exercises a fulfillment of abstractions on paper set against the reality of an unreconstructed country, unbowed and uncaptured terrorists, and a narcostate economy that influences even these electoral processes themselves? Has the United States made any progress in addressing the underlying problems that brought it here in response to 9/11?
"These elections, and the jirgas that came before, they are so much straw scattered on water," says Haji Abdul Jaghori, an aged carpet dealer who never tires of speaking of his friendship with Adolph Dubs, the American ambassador assassinated on the eve of the Soviet invasion. "After Al Qaeda destroyed the towers in New York, and the Americans drove the Taliban into the mountains, everyone was crying 'Afghanistan must be fixed!' as if it took this to make people realize that. But the foreigners have done little here.
Instead of rebuilding Afghanistan, they have destroyed Iraq. What good does it do to elect people to a government without power in a country lost to violence and poverty? There is an old Afghan saying that warns people against walking on straw, for it may conceal deep water. In all the years since my friend Mr. Dubs was killed, the water under the straw has grown ever deeper, darker, and bloodier. You must dedicate yourselves to the difficult task of purifying it if you are to escape its pestilence. Didn't the fate of the towers teach you that this cesspool created by the world cannot be just hidden away?"
Some critics of the international engagement in Afghanistan would agree that on a variety of levels there are things that have been "hidden away" in Afghanistan over the last four years. The simple fact of the overthrow of the Taliban is trumpeted as a final and unqualified success, without reference to the dual reality that predatory warlords have been restored to their old fiefs while the fundamentalist militia has survived and maintains a stubborn insurgency. The reconstruction effort is touted in terms of impressive-sounding amounts of money pledged with no reference to what the actual needs are or whether these funds have been spent responsibly.
"So many Afghans I spoke with felt that the monies declared for Afghanistan were well diluted by the time they were applied to projects that would benefit the people," says Miriam Gettinger of the World Rehabilitation Fund, a New York-based NGO. "Clinics and schools are being built in regions where there is a lack of roads, water, electricity and staff to supply these facilities. The hefty salaries and lifestyles of expatriates leaves little for earmarked programs." Afghan expert Ahmed Rashid, who wrote the bestselling book Taliban, recently estimated that of the $2.5 billion a year that Western donors have committed to the country, less than half has been actually disbursed.
An oft-cited corollary to the inefficiency in spending is a lack of vision as to how aid should be structured. A typical example of this is the US military's constant reiteration that it is digging wells in the villages of the southern Pashtun heartland where it is fighting the Taliban. But the central fact of life in these arid areas is that the fragile karez irrigation system upon which agriculture has always depended there have gone unreconstructed since their devastation by the Soviets as a deliberate tactic of war 20 years ago. Such a rehabilitation project is well within the means and capacity of the Army Corps of Engineers, but the issue has never even been raised. In the absence of such an economic alternative, impoverished farmers have little choice but to cultivate the hardy opium poppies which require little water to thrive, and earn sums for them that are the difference between total indigence and relative prosperity.
"In general I am not happy with the international community's efforts," says Shah Mohammad Rais, Kabul's leading bookseller and an international cultural icon. "There has been an insufficient effort to integrate reconstruction with the Afghan economy and labor force. They have employed foreign builders, not local ones. Maybe in the future the parliament will put pressure on the government to reverse this."
The widespread belief among Afghans that the convening of parliament will lead to a sea change in the reconstruction effort may seem a vindication of the Americans' assertion that a democratic Afghanistan is taking its own destiny into its hands. Such great expectations of an improved reconstruction effort, however, carry their own dangers. Many observers, both Afghan and foreign, warn that the puncturing of this hope will lead to a brutal, if not exactly justified, disillusionment with democracy at work.
"One of the biggest challenges is the managing of expectations," says Peter Dimitroff, the Afghanistan country director of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), an NGO that aids democratic institution building in developing countries. "We find increasingly that ordinary Afghans and candidates have an unrealistic view of what the Wolesi Jirga and the Meshrano Jirga (the lower and upper houses of parliament) can do. Reconstruction is at such a low point that people are going to want their representatives to deliver the goods. But there are major constraints on the government. Eighty percent of reconstruction is entirely under international control. It will lead to a great deal of frustration."
The form that such frustration can take was revealed in April, when several parts of the country were torn by anti-US riots that erupted over allegations that the Koran had been desecrated by American soldiers guarding terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay. Afghan experts such as Professor Barnett Rubin of New York University stated at the time that the underlying cause of the disturbances was frustration over the severely anemic reconstruction effort. "In essence, the Afghans are saying, 'Did you just come here to fight your enemies, or are you here to help us? If it's only the first, you should go,'" Rubin said while a guest on "The News Hour With Jim Lehrer." The course of events in the last six months has amply borne out the fact that when frustration with the reconstruction effort is expressed violently, it will inevitably take the form of Islamic extremism.
The year 2005 has been by far the most violent year in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban. A major increase in insurgent violence across the southern Pashtun heartland, where the Taliban is strongest, and reaching into the north, has left more than 1,300 people dead. Eighty-four of the deaths so far this year are those of soldiers in the US-led coalition force that continues to grapple with the resurgent fundamentalist militia. Most of the coalition dead have been Americans. In early October the American military death toll in the Afghan war reached the 200 mark. But even more troubling than the scale of the violence is its increasingly Iraq-style nature.
Suicide bombings and the deliberate targeting of civilians have never been hallmarks of Afghan guerrilla warfare. Indeed, it was the high number of civilians killed in the crossfire between rival warlords in the 1990s that created a consensus that the Taliban should be allowed to come to power to suppress such disorder. But with the integration of international jihadis, traditional fighting tactics have been swept aside. During the summer several clerics who were supporters of the American-backed government of President Hamid Karzai were assassinated, and a suicide bomber killed half a dozen people at the funeral of one of them in a mosque in Kandahar—an unheard of violation of ancient Afghan religious sensibilities and codes of honor. By early October the pace of suicide bombings had reached several a week, including the bombing of medical clinics.
"There is an ugly mood here, and it is leading to ugly thoughts and actions," says Inayatullah, a dried fruit merchant in Kabul's ancient bazaar. "When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, I heard some people say that this was the wrath of Allah against the Americans, and some were clapping and shouting for joy. This shocked me deeply. There is a growing anger among the people, and one day it is going to explode."
Further complicating the nexus between popular dissatisfaction and its manipulation by international forces is the disputed role of Afghanistan's southern neighbor, Pakistan. Longstanding rivals because of the "Pashtunistan" issue of whether the Pashtun population of northern Pakistan should be allowed to secede and join Afghanistan, their contentious relationship descended into large-scale violence when the Soviet invasion and its aftermath gave Islamabad free reign for a succession of brutal power games culminating in its installation of the Taliban in the mid-1990s. Although Pakistan has been a formal US ally and Karzai-backer since the September 11 attacks, experts question whether this sudden reversal of longtime policies is genuine. The virtual impunity with which Taliban and Al Qaeda forces move back and forth between the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan has led to repeated accusations by the Kabul government that Islamabad is not doing anything to stop the infiltrations—and is even aiding them. The unstated premise is that Pakistan is merely keeping the fundamentalist militia and other jihadis on hold as it waits for US involvement in the region to wane. As it turns out, this continued belief on the part of Pakistan that its interests lie in achieving "strategic depth" by dominating Afghanistan is inseparable from the question of the drug trade.
"This is not just an Afghan affair," says Shah Mohammad Rais of the boom in narcotrafficking. "Drug smuggling is not an easy job, and with such a strong foreign military presence in the region, it requires the help of local governments. The ISI [the Pakistani intelligence agency] is quite heavily involved in it, because the huge profits help fund their operations. This is an organized international drug mafia in which terrorists, criminals, and government elements can participate according to their interests, working together for profit regardless of their ideology—or lack of one."
This is an organized international drug mafia in which terrorists, criminals, and government elements can participate according to their interests, working together for profit. —Shah Mohammed Rais |
The intractable nature of drug-linked corruption in the Afghan government and police in particular was highlighted at the end of September when Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, the most respected technocrat in the Karzai administration, resigned in disgust at his inability to force either his own superiors or their American backers to confront the problem. Jalali, a distinguished former mujahideen fighter and writer on military affairs who acquired American citizenship during his long exile from Soviet and Taliban rule, had been touted over the last two years as the perfect nexus for a coordination of the two countries' efforts against the trade. But the reliance of the weak Kabul government on local warlords to keep outlying areas loyal and the continued attitude of the American military that these warlords are the best bulwark against the Taliban proved an insurmountable contradiction. In the wake of Jalali's departure the British Independent reported that senior Western officials in the Afghan capital were resigned to the fact that the country would continue to be a major source of the world heroin supply for at least another decade.
Yet the international "Great Game"-style power plays that have long been Afghanistan's ruin, and are so much in evidence in the insurgency and the drug trade, do not always impact the country negatively. The most hopeful development amidst a summer of violence was the state visit to Kabul of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in late August, the first such trip since Indira Gandhi met Afghan President Mohammad Da'ud there in 1976. Hoping to revive the counterbalancing alliance against Pakistan that had existed from the time of Jawaharal Nehru, India has played a role in the reconstruction effort that is markedly out of proportion to its resources, and has acquired a reputation for the efficient and quick completion of projects. One of the wonders of a still-desolate Kabul is Habbibia High School, the country's oldest, which was heavily damaged during the civil war. Over the last year, it has been transformed by the Indian government into a state-of-the-art facility that contrasts strongly with the surrounding ruins.
"Though the Punjabis are always against us, now we can count on the Hindustanis," a young student entering the school said right after the prime minister's visit, using Afghan colloquial terms for the subcontinental rivals. India's adroit determination to exercise its influence in ways that combine practicality and symbolism was on display during Singh's public appearances. After announcing that India would "adopt" a hundred Afghan villages to promote their development—a clear bid to curry favor with the rural Pashtuns who are so prone to Taliban and Pakistani influence—the prime minister joined President Karzai and nonagenarian ex-king Zahir Shah in laying the cornerstone for Afghanistan's new parliament building.
Amidst an otherwise general lack of progress on the reconstruction, security, and anti-narcotic fronts, the holding of a peaceful election in mid-September was hailed as an indication that matters are not as dire as they seem. Not only did the insurgents fail to disrupt the voting, but the campaign itself was interrupted by relatively few violent incidents and a lack of acrimony among the thousands of candidates vying for hundreds of parliamentary and provincial council seats. The low voter turnout of about 50 percent of the electorate, which was largely due to the inaccessibility of polling stations in remote rural areas, did not alter the fact that Afghans are concentrating a great deal of attention and expectation on the formation of the new legislature.
 A farmer milks poppies in the southeastern province of Helmand, Afghanistan, April 2, 2004. Irrigation systems promised by the US have not materialized, leaving farmers with little choice but to cultivate opium poppies, which require little water to thrive. (Photo: REUTERS) |
If not open enthusiasm, a general mood of optimism was evident at Eid Gad mosque, Kabul's grandest, on election day. As separate lines of men and women entered the sweeping, portico-style structure to mark their ballots, Zabihullah, one of the poll monitors, assessed expectations. "The consequences will be very much positive," he said. "The voting makes ordinary Afghans feel that they have power and that pressure can be put to stop corruption. There is good security, a good atmosphere, and people are coming out to choose a new way for Afghanistan."
Yet the aftermath of the vote was tainted by evidence of ballot stuffing, and when the partial results were announced on October 5 it was evident that a substantial number of ex-mujahideen commanders, drawing on tribal and ethnic ties, had won seats. This was a severe disappointment to Afghans who had hoped that the political process would mark a clean break from the country's violent warlord past.
The disconnect between the way the Afghan elite and foreigners assisting the country's rehabilitation effort view the purpose and nature of the political process here and what it means to the great majority of people is perhaps epitomized by the issue of female candidates. While their participation in the campaign is always spoken of in terms of women's rights by Western governments and the international media, popular attitudes to the question of women in office reveal the relentless concentration of Afghans on the immediate practical betterment of their lives.
"Many female and male voters have been saying that women are a good addition to parliament because, 'their hands are clean' and they would be less susceptible to corruption," says Lina Abirafeh, an American who helped organize the elections as a member of the Joint Electoral Management Board that combined native and expatriate officials. "I would say that female voters are hoping that material conditions and security will be improved, more than advocating their rights."
As far as official pronouncements go, they would seem to have the perfect empathy of the international community. "There has to be an antidote to extremism and terrorism—and it is prosperity and peace and democracy. Our forces are here for those purposes," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said to reporters after meeting with President Karzai in Kabul on October 12. "The Afghan people will have partners through NATO and coalition forces, and through American forces, as long as they are needed and in whatever number to make certain we defeat terrorists and Afghanistan becomes a place of stability and progress."
Yet even as she spoke, the Taliban were preparing a major attack that blew up all eight of the large fuel tankers parked outside the international military base at Kandahar Airfield, President Karzai was warning of the powerful symbiosis between the insurgents and the drug trade, and the karez irrigation works remained in ruins. If Afghans are confident—some say overconfident—about their ability to finally take their destiny into their own hands, they remain apprehensive about whether they will be given a helping hand to do it.
"There is a great fear that there will be a downsizing of the international presence," says Dimitroff. "There is a perception that the epicenter of the war on terror has moved elsewhere, and Afghanistan is forgotten. If such a reduction did occur, it would be a great psychological blow to the Afghan people. It's not a blow the international community can afford to inflict. The stakes are too high. The danger of Afghanistan returning to be an exporter of terrorism is too great."