Anybody else there is just as bad.
It was Karzai's dysfunctional state of warlords and criminals that opened the door for the Taliban's return.
Where the Taliban still roams
Patrick Cockburn | May 16, 2009
Article from: The Australian
WHEN Hamid Karzai drove to Kabul airport to fly to the US last week, the centre of the Afghan capital was closed down by well-armed security officers, soldiers and police. While in Washington, Afghanistan's President delivered a speech on ways of fighting terrorism. The title of his lecture shows a certain cheek. Karzai's seven years in power since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 have been notable for his failure to prevent their resurgence.
If his motorcade out of Kabul had taken a different route and headed south, he soon would have experienced the limits of his Government's authority. It ends at a beleaguered police post within a few minutes' drive of the capital.
Drivers heading for the southern cities of Ghazni, Qalat and Kandahar check their pockets to make sure they are not carrying documents linking them to the Government. They do so because they know they will not have travelled far down the road before they are stopped and their identity checked by black-turbaned Taliban. On their motorcycles, squads of six to eight men set up checkpoints along the road. Sometimes they even take a traveller's mobile phone and redial numbers recently called. If the call is answered by a government ministry or a foreigner, then the phone's owner may be executed on the spot.
The jibe that Karzai is only mayor of Kabul has some truth to it. It is not only when travelling south that the Taliban is in control. I wanted to go to Bamyan in central Afghanistan, which is inhabited by the Hazara, an ethnic group that was savagely persecuted by fundamentalist Taliban during its years in power.
But it turned out that I could no longer travel there by road. Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a member of the Afghan parliament representing Bamyan, who spent two years in a Taliban prison before escaping, tells me that Bamyan is safe enough. The problem is the route.
"There are two roads going there, but do not take the southern one because it is controlled by the Taliban," Jawadi says. There is an alternative, safe enough so long as "you bring plenty of armed guards".
The best experts on the dangers of the road in most countries are not the police or the army but the truckers, whose lives and livelihoods depend on correctly assessing the risks. The situation deteriorated 18 months ago, says Abdul Bayan, owner of a transport company in Kabul called Nawe Aryana. His trucks carry goods across the country, but they face ever increasing danger, particularly if they are carrying supplies for NATO or foreign forces.
Even hiring your own security men is not necessarily a guarantee of safety. On the same morning that Karzai was leaving Kabul, the Taliban attacked a squad of security men in Qalat, capital of Zabul province in the far south. Hired to protect road construction workers, they were slaughtered in a gun battle.
Asked why he did not look for help from the army or police, Bayan looks bemused. "Get help from the soldiers and policemen? Why, they can't even protect themselves, so what can they do for me?"
The question goes to the heart of the crisis in Afghanistan. It is not so much that the Taliban is strong and popular but that the Government is weak, corrupt and dysfunctional.
"Security has not deteriorated because of what the Taliban has done but because people feel the Government is unjust," says Daoud Sultanzoy, an MP from Ghazni province. "It is seen as the enemy of the people and, because there is no constitutional alternative to it, the Taliban gain."
He believes that unless there is an Afghan government deemed just and legitimate by the Afghan people, military gains will mean nothing and the Taliban will keep up its fight for decades. Support for the Taliban is not very high, but it has increased since 2006, when its rebellion effectively resumed with Pakistani aid. During the past three years, backing for the US and the Afghan Government has plummeted. Forty-fiveper cent of Afghans in the south and east of the country, where most of the fighting is taking place, say that violence against coalition forces can be justified, according to an opinion poll. The poll shows that the Afghan desire for retribution is significantly boosted by shelling or bombing of civilian targets.
Ominously for the US surge, the increase in the number of US troops in Afghanistan is opposed by most Afghans. They say that their presence will simply lead to more fighting.
The problem for Barack Obama is similar to that facing Afghans. His administration can see the failings of Karzai and his Government but can't see an alternative.
The problem for Afghanistan is that its political landscape was created by the events of late 2001. In the preceding months, the Taliban, backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, had been extending its grip across the whole country. The Northern Alliance was being squeezed by Taliban into the mountainous northeast.
Many of its adherents believed it faced ultimate defeat, particularly after its leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was assassinated by two members of al-Qa'ida pretending to be a television crew. The movement might have collapsed. But two days later came the September11 attack on the US.
The US was determined to overthrow the Taliban in retribution for hosting al-Qa'ida, and the Northern Alliance, previously regarded with suspicion by the US because of its Iranian and Russian connections, was the only local ally available. Northern Alliance forces were victorious because they were backed by American B-52 bombers and small teams of US military advisers. The CIA paid large sums of money to local commanders to persuade them to go home.
It is probable that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, whose support had been crucial to the rise of the Taliban, was telling them not to fight to the end but to wait until the US lost interest in Afghanistan. Many of the Afghan leaders who rule today won power during this unexpected turnaround in Afghan politics.
"The political, religious and economic mafia are all Northern Alliance people," says Sultanzoy. "Nobody outside the Northern Alliance is in the Government."
This is something of an exaggeration, but the warlords of the Northern Alliance treated their takeover of government as a plundering expedition. There was a shift of power away from the Pashtun, the community to which 42 per cent belong, towards the Tajiks (27 per cent), Hazara (9 per cent) and Uzbeks (9 per cent).
In the Kabul district of Sherpoor, their palaces, fortified and often rented out for large sums to foreign aid agencies, were built on land seized by them or handed to them by the Government. In one part of Sherpoor there is a remarkable pink palace belonging to Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, who has since had to take refuge in Istanbul. In registering for re-election this week, Karzai chose as his vice-presidential candidate Tajik leader Mohammad Qasim Fahim, whom Human Rights Watch has described as "one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands from the civil war".
A measure of the failure of Karzai, his Government and his Western supporters is that I was able to drive from Kabul to Kandahar eight years ago, but if I tried to make the same journey today I would be killed or kidnapped.
Even then, in 2001, it was a dangerous road since the exact state of disintegration of the Taliban and the mood of their fighters was uncertain. In a heavily guarded palace in the ancient city of Ghazni, governor Qari Baba had benignly stated that all was secure in his province, but he was so new to his post that he had not even bothered to tear old Taliban propaganda posters off the walls of his office.
Though the Taliban had gone, it had not gone far, and there were plenty of menacing men in black with assault rifles slung over their shoulders in the courtyard of the governor's palace. For all Qari Baba's show of confidence, he moved in a convoy of 20 armoured vehicles.
Karzai, who had just been appointed head of an interim government, was not regarded with much respect. Abdul Ahmed, a warlord from Maydanshar, just outside Kabul, was contemptuous of him, saying that he had been appointed "because of pressure from the outside world. He has done no fighting against the Taliban."
The war against the Taliban in 2001 produced winners and losers who did not change much in subsequent years. What has changed is security, which Bayan, the truck owner, says is worse than at any time since the communists were in power. It is no longer possible to drive to Ghazni. Even Sultanzoy, an MP for the province, says it is too dangerous for him to go there, "though I am more afraid of the Government shooting me than the Taliban".
In any case, most of the winners in the war live north of Kabul.
After 9/11 I had wanted to get into Afghanistan and had flown to Dushanbe in Tajikistan in the hope of crossing the Amu Darya river to reach opposition-held territory. In the event, the Northern Alliance provided a Soviet helicopter that flew us over the Hindu Kush to the war-battered town of Jabal Saraj at the southern end of the Panjshir valley just north of Kabul. It was a strategically vital area that put the Northern Alliance within striking distance of Kabul. The Taliban repeatedly tried to capture it and for years had fought for the Shomali plain, one of the most fertile parts of Afghanistan, through which ran the front line.
The people of Shomali are Tajiks and supporters of the Northern Alliance. They have done well out of the peace. Once again their fruit and vegetables can reach the Kabul markets. The trade route through the Salang tunnel, which pierces the Hindu Kush and connects southern and northern Afghanistan, is open again. But the local warlords such as Bashir Salangi, who commanded Northern Alliance forces in the Salang Valley, or Baba Jan, in charge of the front north of Bagram, have done best for themselves with government jobs and private business.
The Afghan Government may be weakened by jobs for the boys, particularly when the boys in question are warlords who inflicted a devastating civil war on Afghanistan in the 1990s.
But it is corruption rather than patronage that is discrediting the Government's legitimacy. In Transparency International's list of the most corrupt countries, Afghanistan ranks 176 out of 180. In few countries is corruption so widespread or open as it is in Kabul, where poppy palaces are built from the profits of the heroin and opium trade. Ministers with small salaries are able to afford $US1 million ($1.3 million) on building mansions. Former finance minister Ashraf Ghani says the whole country is criminalised.
"You have to pay $US10,000 in bribes to get a job as a district police chief and up to $US150,000 to get a job as chief of police anywhere on the border because there you can make a lot of money," says Aminullah Amarkhail, former head of security at Kabul airport.
He believes that what happens in Afghanistan should be compared with looting rather than simple corruption.
US troop reinforcements this year may make Afghanistan's roads safer. The US military also will have money to spend to carry out aid projects immediately. The US is sending 4000 extra military trainers, as well as more combat brigades. But these reinforcements will lead to more violence and air strikes. These will inflict civilian casualties, which infuriate Afghans and lead to a rise in support for the Taliban. Given the Government's lack of legitimacy and its inability to provide basic services, the Taliban does not have to do much to destabilise the country.
The Taliban regime was always hated by the great majority, who were glad to see it fall. Here, the US presence was welcomed at first. There may not have been enough foreign aid but there was enough to make a difference to the lives of Afghans. It was Karzai's dysfunctional state of warlords and criminals that opened the door for the Taliban's return.
The Independent
Patrick Cockburn won this year's Orwell Prize for journalism.
Where the Taliban still roams | The Australian (18 May 2009)
theaustralian.news.com.au |
