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Hamid Karzai |
PUBLICATIONS CITED IN THIS ARTICLE
a briefing paper, 12 pp., December 5, 2002
a report, 50 pp., December 2002
a report, 52 pp., November 2002
a report, 102 pp., July 2003
a report, 24 pp., June 2003
a report, 20 pp., December 3, 2003
In late December 2001 Hamid Karzai set out for Kabul for the first time since the defeat of the Taliban. He had been fighting along with his fellow Kandahari tribesmen in the last battle against the Taliban over control of his home city. Earlier in December all the anti-Taliban Afghan factions, under the auspices of the United Nations, had signed an agreement at Bonn, which chose him as chairman of the new interim government of Afghanistan.
Karzai, a tribal chief from the Pashtun majority ethnic group, flew to Kabul in a US military aircraft, arriving in the evening. At the airport to receive him was the warlord General Mohammad Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley (like his deceased leader Ahmed Shah Massoud), now defense minister and the head of the Shura-e-Nazar, or Northern Alliance, which had fought alongside US forces to defeat the Taliban and capture Kabul.
Fahim walked up to the plane accompanied by nearly one hundred bodyguards, loyalists, and ministers all bristling with weapons. Karzai got off the plane with just four companions. As the two men shook hands on the tarmac, Fahim looked confused. "Where are your men?" he asked. Karzai turned to him in his disarmingly gentle manner of speaking. "Why General," he replied, "you are my men—all of you are Afghans and are my men—we are united now—surely that is why we fought the war and signed the Bonn agreement?"
Karzai told me this story one eve-ning late this past summer in Kabul. Perhaps more than any other story I have heard in twenty-three years of writing about the war in Afghanistan, it summarizes the kind of place Afghanistan has become, but also in which direction many of its people have wanted to take the country. General Fahim, more powerful than ever with his own army and sources of income, is essentially a man of the past who thinks of Afghanistan as defined by ethnicity and tribal rule and believes power can be exercised through the guns of his followers.
From March 2002 until September 2003, Fahim delayed implementing the reforms in the Ministry of Defense that would require him to replace his Tajik generals with a more ethnically balanced officer corps. Such a reform is a precondition for carrying out a $200 million UN-sponsored plan to pay off and disarm 100,000 militiamen loyal to the warlords. Fahim was clearly trying to block reforms until the US began to apply strong pressure on him to comply. Since September Fahim has begun to make the changes demanded by the UN, but they are as yet far from complete.
In contrast, Karzai, a well-educated and widely read man, has a vision of building a modern, democratic country that would no longer be a pariah state. He wants a cabinet that would bring together its ethnically diverse members, who have been at war with one another ever since 1989, when the former Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. He saw no need to fly in dozens of his fellow Kandahari tribesmen just to impress the warlords in Kabul. He wanted to set a different example.
Ordinary Afghans understand such symbols and gestures, since this is a culture where body language and actions are far more important than words. But the question on everyone's minds, even at the beginning, was whether the powerful nations and most importantly the United States would back Karzai's democratic vision or Fahim's vision of maintaining the status quo. Would the Bush administration make the cheaper and easier choice to leave in place the warlords who had opposed the Taliban, or would the US genuinely help to start the process of nation-building in a country where there was neither a functioning state nor national unity? Until very recently, it has chosen to stick with the warlords.
In Kabul the US backs the Karzai government; in the countryside the US has failed to forcefully challenge warlords like Fahim and their gross abuses of human rights, their heroin smuggling, their defiance of the central government, their desire to maintain their fiefdoms, and their resistance to democracy. The US continues to provide money for aid projects and for building a new army and police force; but it has not been using its power as effectively as it should to bring the country closer to democratic self-government.
Late in the summer of 2003, with American forces bogged down in Iraq and Saddam Hussein still at large, the Bush administration appeared to have what one senior US official in Kabul described to me as an epiphany. With no turning point in Iraq in sight, he said, no accomplishment that might help the President's approval rating as the country entered an election year, Bush's advisers decided that Afghanistan needed to be turned into a success story. If Osama bin Laden could not be caught, at least there should be an Afghan presidential election that could be publicized as a major step forward in the war against terrorism. For that to happen, more money was needed, reconstruction had to be accelerated, and the creation of new Afghan security forces speeded up. And, for the first time, the official said, the US began to recognize that to carry out these plans, the warlords had to be neutralized.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the new US ambassador to Kabul and President Bush's special representative to Afghanistan, describes US policy somewhat differently. The administration, he told me in Kabul in December, now believes that by pumping money and effort into the country at a quicker rate and achieving more rapid results, the US can speed up its withdrawal.
The US is now determined that elections go ahead by June, as stipulated in the Bonn agreement of December 2001. But almost all other key forces—the UN, most European and NATO countries, Western and Afghan NGOs, as well as many Afghans—have pleaded with the US to postpone them for at least a year. That much time is needed, they say, to increase security, build more infrastructure, strengthen the central government, and complete important building projects. However the final decision rests with Karzai. UN officials recently told me that too many parts of Afghanistan are still a war zone, and at least half of Karzai's cabinet would prefer to delay the elections. "The security situation has to improve and real reconstruction must start before elections can be held," Vice President Amin Arsala told me in December. Karzai himself acknowledges that the country has reached no more than "only 40 to 50 percent of the administrative ability that a government in a country like ours should have." Still, Karzai and some who are close to him strongly supported early elections, cooperating with the Americans in upholding the image they are trying to project of a stable, post-conflict state where free and fair elections can be held.
In the winter of 1994–1995, I went on a long journey to try to understand the new Islamic movement, which called itself "Taliban," or "movement of Islamic students," that was emerging in Kandahar. I knew virtually all of the Afghan Communist and Mujahideen leaders but had no knowledge of the Taliban leaders—who they were, where they'd come from, or what they believed in. I traveled first to Quetta, the capital of Pakistan's Baluchistan province, where thousands of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban students from the madrasas, or religious schools, set up by Pakistani Islamic parties there were being taken by bus into Kandahar to join the advance Taliban forces.
I learned that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) together with the government of then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was providing support to the Taliban. The ISI was to become the main prop for the future Taliban regime, which would soon join up with al-Qaeda when Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996. The Afghan drug mafia and the Pakistani trucking mafia wanted to revive their trade in smuggled goods between Iran, Pakistan, and Central Asia; they were enthusiastically funding the Taliban, because the Taliban were clearing Afghanistan's roads of the warlords' checkposts.
When I arrived in Kandahar, I found that the Taliban, under their one-eyed leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, were establishing bizarre so-called Islamic laws which had nothing to do with Afghan or Pashtun history or culture, or with Islam itself. They were inspired by the jihadi ideology of Pakistani extremist groups who had earlier given the Taliban shelter. The Taliban stood for an imported ideology, first from Pakistan and later from al-Qaeda.
Nearly a decade later, this past autumn, I made the same journey again. What I saw was history repeating itself —in some respects in ways that were worse than before. "The Taliban are gathering again in the same places from where they started, it's like a rerun of an old movie," says Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's brother, who is based in Kandahar. "They are," he said, "attacking reconstruction projects and educational establishments— that is their main enemy. Yet they have no popular support. The biggest problem the people face is the lack of security and an effective administration."
Pakistan's Jamiat-e-Ullema Islam (JUI) party now forms part of the governing coalition that rules Baluchistan. It is using its madrasas and mosques to house and mobilize thousands of a new, even younger generation of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban to fight the Karzai government and terrorize southern Afghanistan. After prayers are over, the young Taliban— many of them in their teens—flood into the tea stalls of Pushtunabad, a Quetta suburb, in their distinctive black clothes, black turbans, long beards, and unkempt hair. They talk of the progress of the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan today. Taliban fighters, I was told, are better equipped than they were in 1994. They are buying Thuraya satellite telephones and hundreds of Honda motorbikes to carry out guerrilla raids; they are also importing night-vision equipment from the Arab Gulf states.
President Karzai and other Afghan leaders have been harshly critical of the support the Taliban receives from the JUI and elements in the ISI. Even though Pakistan's military regime arrested some five hundred members of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, it still has not arrested a single Taliban leader. The drug mafia is flourishing and providing money to the Taliban and to al-Qaeda, and both the warlords and the Taliban are obtaining huge revenues by imposing taxes on goods smuggled between Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia. In 2003, Afghanistan produced 3,600 tons of opium, or 76 percent of total world production. Opium is now produced in twenty-eight of Afghanistan's thirty-two provinces, as compared to just eighteen provinces in 1999.
Since August over four hundred Afghans—soldiers, policemen, aid wor- kers, civilians—and four US soldiers have been killed by the Taliban in their indiscriminate terror campaign. International aid agencies such as Oxfam have fled the growing chaos in southern Afghanistan. The UN has decided that more than half of the country's provinces are too dangerous for its aid workers. Armed attacks against Western and Afghan aid workers have risen from one a month last year to one every day or two this summer and autumn, according to CARE, a leading Western NGO. On November 16, in broad daylight, two Taliban in Ghazni assassinated Bettina Gioslard, a twenty-nine-year-old French-born official of the UN High Commission for Refugees. The event led to near panic among aid workers, and UN officials warned that they might be forced to pull out some eight hundred foreign staff, as they had earlier in Iraq.
This is the first time in twenty-five years of continuous war that Afghan rebels have deliberately targeted aid workers, women, and children. The major difference between 1994 and 2003 is that the Taliban, rather than just seizing power in Kabul, are now backed by al-Qaeda forces, which remain elusive but well armed, and have adopted the rhetoric of global jihad against the US. Along with Osama bin Laden, the Taliban's Mullah Mohammad Omar is still at large.
In August, after months of conducting hit-and-run raids from their bases in Pakistan, over one thousand members of the Taliban in Afghanistan's Zabul province, which borders Baluchistan, fought a pitched battle with US and Afghan government forces. Despite heavy US bombing the Taliban resisted for nine days before retreating, leaving behind some two hundred dead. The Taliban leaders claimed this as a major victory because they stood up to the Americans for the first time since their defeat in 2001. Yousuf Pashtun, the governor of Kandahar province, believes that in the next phase of their terror campaign the Taliban will try to capture district headquarters in the southern provinces and engage in urban terrorism in Afghan cities. On January 6, two bomb blasts in Kandahar claimed some fifteen lives, many of them children. US and Afghan forces have tried to clamp down on such attacks by relentless patrolling in the south. On December 2, just before the recent Loya Jirga, or grand tribal assembly, met in Kabul to discuss and ratify a new constitution, US forces launched their biggest offensive since the defeat of the Taliban regime. The action, which took place in seven provinces, was designed to keep Taliban insurgents off guard while the Jirga was in progress.
This Jirga was the second to be held since the fall of the Taliban. (The first, in June 2002, elected Karzai as president.) It had originally been scheduled for October, but was delayed for two months because of the worsening security situation in the south. The program of "disarmament, deregistration, and reintegration" to disarm the warlord armies was also delayed, although a pilot project began on October 24.
The Loya Jirga convened on December 14 and was expected to endorse the new constitution within ten days. However, it continued for twenty-two tense days while the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the UN special representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, worked out back-room compromises between the government and those opposing the envisaged strong presidential system. On January 4, the 502 delegates, of whom one hundred were women, eventually agreed to a constitution of 160 articles, which conceded more powers to an elected parliament, granted equal rights to women, and provided for language and other rights to be accorded to the ethnic minorities. John Sifton of Human Rights Watch made a cautionary comment about the constitution that seems apt: "There are several provisions enunciating basic political, civil, economic, and social rights, but little strong language creating institutions to uphold them."
The intense and often bitter debates and frequent near breakdowns of the entire process demonstrated that the acute ethnic divisions in the country, which sustained the civil war in the 1990s, were still rampant. The majority Pashtun population, which have been alienated from the rest of the country for the past two years because the Taliban arose largely among them, backed fellow Pashtun President Karzai's call for strong central rule; they believed this would help them make a political comeback. However, the ethnic minorities in northern Afghanistan —Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Turcomens—demanded greater autonomy, more powers for parliament, and the right to be educated in their own languages. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalists from all ethnic groups, led by the former fundamentalist Mujahideen leader Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, backed a constitution that would have much more Islamic content.
The compromises reached will not end these tensions. The continuing ethnic divisions and the strength of the Islamists today are as much a reflection of the civil war as they are a result of the world's failure to help rebuild the country. Many Afghan delegates told me that jobs, education, security, better communications, and governmental institutions are needed to foster greater unity and nation-building, and to blunt Islamic extremism.
Also delayed because of worsening security and the lack of funding from Western donors was a UN and Afghan government program to register 10.5 million Afghani citizens for the elections that are supposed to take place in June but now seem likely to be delayed. Reginald Austin, the head of the UN electoral division, told me in Kabul that, by mid-December, only 50,000 people had been registered, as opposed to the 500,000 who are supposed to have been registered by that date according to the plan. He also said that the threat of Taliban attacks against his staff had forced him to close down registration stations in Kandahar on December 13. For Afghan civilians the lack of security remains the main issue. The 5,300-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has not moved much beyond Kabul since it was established at Bonn. In August NATO took command of the ISAF force—the first time it has moved outside Europe. NATO has pledged to expand the ISAF incrementally outside Kabul, first to Kunduz in the northeast. Some Afghans scoff at this because Kunduz is one of the most peaceful places in the country.
The Pentagon has resisted expanding the ISAF, because it has not wanted any interference in the US-led coalition's attempts to capture bin Laden. In a belated half-measure the US and its allies established Provincial Reconstruction Teams, or PRTs, in Bamiyan, Kunduz, Gardez, and Mazar-e-Sharif, each consisting of between sixty and one hundred soldiers and technicians to administer aid projects in rural areas where security was poor and to help establish the writ of the central government. But the PRTs were too small, too poorly funded, and they had no mandate to provide security to the local population or to help resolve local conflicts. The warlords and drug smugglers continued to thrive under this arrangement because they knew the Americans would not interfere with their illegal businesses. On December 21, the US military announced plans to increase the number of PRTs from five to twelve, and to give them additional powers to provide security. They are expected to be working in the field by March.
Although the US has spent $500 million to help train a new national army and police force, only seven thousand soldiers have been trained so far and the CIA continues to fund some warlord militias in the field as part of the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In a multilateral division of labor, the US is training the new Afghan army; Germany is training the new police force; Italy has responsibility for legal reform; Japan is responsible for disarming warlord militias; and Britain leads the anti-narcotics effort. Now, two years after the defeat of the Taliban, none of these programs has been particularly effective. They lack sufficient funds, expertise, and willingness to confront major problems.
Beside the problem of security, the Afghans' other major concern is the lack of international funds for reconstruction. "We are trapped in a vicious circle," Governor Pashtun of Kandahar told me. "If there is no money for reconstruction there can be no peace, and without peace and a stable law-and-order situation, there can be no reconstruction." Barnett Rubin of the Center for International Cooperation in New York has estimated that as of November 2003 only $110 million worth of reconstruction projects were completed in the country, out of a total UN aid disbursement of $2.9 billion between December 2001 and November 2003. (Of that total, the US contributed $1.1 billion.) Meanwhile, the US-led coalition forces spend $1 billion a month to maintain over 11,000 men and women in the field.
In January 2001 at a donors conference in Tokyo the World Bank estimated that Afghanistan needed $15 billion for the next five years. The nations present pledged only $4.5 billion for Afghanistan's reconstruction for five years. Even that money has been painfully slow in coming, and little of it has been spent on basic infrastructure —building roads and electric power stations and restoring irrigation networks. Afghanistan's minister of finance, Ashraf Ghani, now estimates that his country requires $30 billion over the next fifteen years, but with the huge needs in Iraq it is unlikely that either the US or its allies will ever contribute anything approaching that sum. Under these conditions warlordism and drug production have thrived.
In September the US pledged to deliver some $1.2 billion in additional aid for the current fiscal year (2003–2004), more than doubling the amount it had earlier pledged for the year. It also sped up a $180 million project to rebuild the Kabul–Kandahar highway, which was completed in December and is potentially of great importance both militarily and economically. The US pledged to complete the training of the Afghan army and police before the planned June elections. But throwing new money at the country will not bring about the changes that are needed unless Washington is genuinely willing to aggressively target warlords and drug smugglers, to put pressure on Pakistan to halt its support of the Taliban resurgence, and to decisively back the central government.
In Washington there continues to be infighting between the Pentagon, which wants to maintain control of Afghan policy, and the State Department and the US Agency for International Development, which have been pushed to the sidelines. A significant difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is that most Afghans still welcome NATO peacekeeping troops and the American presence—even if their frustration with both forces is now increasing.
Since the end of 2002, most of the major US think tanks, human rights groups, and Western NGOs have persistently pointed out the flaws in US strategy and suggested the fairly obvious changes that need to be made. As in Iraq, however, the Bush administration is extremely reluctant to admit its mistakes or rectify them publicly or even make reliable information available.
In this situation, the reports of the New York–based Human Rights Watch (HRW) have become extremely important. On a shoestring budget and with no permanent Western experts or large office in Kabul, frequently harassed and criticized by the US, the UN, and the warlords, HRW has documented practically every aspect of the growing crisis in a series of detailed reports which have offered sensible recommendations. Cogent and eminently practical, these reports have gone far beyond an account of human rights abuses in the country.
Along with organizations such as Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Crisis Group, and many of the eighty Western NGOs that work in Kabul, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly made the point that creating an increased respect for human rights is not simply a matter of pointing to abuses but must be seen as part of a process of nation-building in which people will be protected. Security cannot be achieved as long as warlords trample on people's basic rights. Political stability is impossible unless there is both a constitution and an accepted legal system that encourages free debate. Today's crisis in Afghanistan was foreseen by HRW more than a year ago; some of the reports it issued in 2002 and early 2003 can still be read as accurate accounts of what is happening now. In the HRW report issued in December 2002, the organization pointed ou
