NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
August 10, 2002
The first shall be last
Eight months after the extinction of the Taliban regime Afghanistan is less an enigma than a self-contradiction wrapped in a Catch-22 and tied in a Gordian knot. It remains hard to see how the country can evolve into a modern unified secular state let alone a democracy. The main news yesterday was (or should have been) from Washington about Iraq. Opposition groups under the umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress were sitting down with senior officials of the U.S. State and Defence departments and a video-link to Vice President Dick Cheney openly if not publicly discussing how best to bring about the fall of Saddam Hussein govern Iraq after that and guide it towards democracy eventually. (There really wasn't leisure to chat about such things before going into Afghanistan.) The Washington conference in turn seems to have triggered an anxiety attack by members of Congress led surprisingly by the Republican House leader Dick Armey a prominent Bush supporter from Texas who retires this year. Congress is trying to manoeuvre President Bush into a position where he will be obliged to seek a clear Congressional mandate to proceed formally into Iraq. This would in turn provide Saddam with both the delay he seeks in U.S. action and a guarantee against any sort of military surprise. On the other hand it would be constitutionally proper. Leaving that huge issue aside until it has had a few more days to stew the interesting thing is the lengths to which the Bush administration is now going to plot democratic change in Muslim countries. The Washington conference is of a piece with the administration's recent efforts to force the creation of a new Palestinian Authority which will be answerable to free electors and the rule of law as the kernel of an eventual Palestinian state; and with the President's recent rhetorical intervention in Iran. But in the one place where "democratization" is theoretically proceeding without major impediments the difficulty of the process is revealed. That is because the impediments are far more numerous and subtle than can be easily seen. Afghanistan's defence minister Mohammad Qaseem Fahim is a nasty piece of work. A Tadzhik from the Panjshir Valley in his mid-forties like most other members of the Afghan cabinet; he defected to the Islamic opposition after serving in the notorious "Khad" or secret police under the Soviet occupation. An understudy to the unjustly sainted Ahmed Shah Massood he replaced the charismatic Northern Alliance guerrilla leader as military boss after Al Qaeda succeeded in assassinating Massood. In early July one of President Karzai's vice presidents Abdul Qadir the Pashtun warlord of Jalalabad was gunned down in what was clearly an in-house job. An attempt to assassinate or at least scare Mr. Karzai himself was then uncovered. Two weeks ago a car bomber was able to infiltrate Kabul and was a few hundred metres away from the presidential palace when he was stopped by a road accident. A well-placed source in London has repeatedly told me once in advance of assassination plots originating in the present Afghan defence ministry including the first two of those mentioned above. According to this source and another in Kabul the second was a "payback" after President Karzai attempted to limit Mr. Fahim's authority following the discovery of his role in the former incident. President Karzai was compelled to ignore appearances and replace his native Afghan bodyguards with U.S. Marines: there were too many suspicious Tadzhiks in the previous retinue. There is still some mystery about the car-bombing attempt which had some marks of Al Qaeda but exposed a security lapse so bad as to be possibly intentional. Imagine trying to run a government like this with your ministers plotting to kill one another or you. And each one (except the few decorative intellectuals and women) has a real power base and gunmen personally loyal to him and his own special relationship with the U.S. military based on helping them hunt down Taliban and Al Qaeda in the part of the country which he effectively controls. And Mr. Karzai's power base consists by comparison of his golden-tongued charm in about seven languages plus those American bodyguards. You just have to laugh and I understand Mr. Karzai has a commendable sense of humour. He is also genuinely persuasive. A Pashtun-speaking former Afghan exile tells me that Mr. Karzai has -- by word power alone -- won over several of the Northern Alliance lords and works a behind-the-scenes partnership with his Tadzhik foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah; that he is even making some progress in convincing Defence Minister Fahim that it would be more fun to run the army of a united Afghanistan than just a tribal force in a few mountain valleys. The trick is keeping Mr. Karzai alive for he is almost irreplaceable. The amount of violence around Kabul itself is discouraging enough; as we move away from the capital we find the only kind of order is what can be imposed by the various warlords; and that the only hint of a national government is that the warlords are themselves accommodated within that cabinet back in Kabul. The most powerful among them sit together on the national defence commission: Rashid Dostum (Uzbek boss of Mazar) Ismail Khan (Tadhik boss of Herat) Gul Aga (Pashtun boss of Kandahar) Atta Mohammed (Pashtun northern boss and thus rival to Dostum). Worse still each of these warlords maintains semi-secret connexions with interested foreign powers and is a potential proxy for any one of them (Russia Iran Pakistan etc.) An explosion yesterday in Jalalabad east of the capital killed a couple of dozen people injured scores more and seriously damaged at least 50 houses. It may have been another car bomb placed to detonate an explosives cache in a construction yard so in turn to destroy the nearby hydro-electric dam and thus put Jalalabad's lights out. This is the sort of chain-reaction hit in which Al Qaeda would take pride. Or it might have been a gang vendetta since a power struggle is going on in Jalalabad. Or it might have been a complete accident. Barely 100 kilometres away in Kabul no one yet seems sure what happened. And every day things happen like this. The U.S. is concentrating on doing the one thing essential to help President Karzai build a unified state: training and equiping a national army. But that army must report through the defence ministry even if President Karzai is nominally its commander-in-chief; and no matter what he is told to do Defence Minister Fahim continues to insinuate goon-like officers into it of purely Tadzhik ethnicity who will be tribally loyal exclusively to him. If it were possible to remove Mr. Fahim without also provoking civil war in the streets of Kabul between Northern Alliance and the Pashtuns it would have been done already. Former Vice President Al Gore prominent Democrats and many Europeans have advised the Bush administration to do "first things first" -- first consolidate order and democracy in Afghanistan before carrying the battle against international terror to Iraq and beyond. This would mean waiting forever. The contrary is the only practical course. The prospects for building something resembling unified democracies under the rule of law are far better (though not therefore good) in such countries as Iraq and Iran -- whose peoples are more sophisticated and urbane and more hungry for governance in the Western style. Even "Palestine" is a more likely place to start in a society that is at least largely post-tribal. Afghanistan is among the least likely candidates for "democratization" and is anyway peripheral to the real centre of action in the Middle East. The Afghans could rather benefit from the example of faster progress elsewhere. They will simply need extra time to advance from the 9th to the 21st century. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top