NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
November 24, 2001
So what's next?
Quite apart from the ethnic complications there are two Afghanistans at the moment. One is like Marjan the lion in the Kabul zoo. I saw him once when he was young and healthy and the King of Afghanistan was still on his throne. I have just discovered that not only the much-publicized Zahir Shah is still alive (the ex-king deposed in 1973) but so is Marjan both perhaps the worse for wear. He (the lion) is now 38 years old and came through the U.S. bombing raids unscathed as indeed through a (human) generation of civil wars and some seven changes of (city) government each one of them rather bloody. He requires 10 kilos of meat a day which explains why he is now so thin; the zookeepers often went begging to the halal shops to find food for Marjan. He is also blind lame and according to the news report frequently abandoned to the taunts of children. The other Afghanistan is represented rather attractively by Maryam Shakiba the girl of 16 who has become the principal newsreader on Kabul TV -- itself a restoration after more than five years of Taliban misrule. (They could not abide television one of the few things I have in common with them.) Though back on air only since Sunday at low power from a single transmitter Miss Shakiba is actually a veteran of broadcasting having hosted a children's show until the station went down the last time the government of Kabul was turned over. One look at her face and you know that she will now be an international celebrity. It was the brilliant stroke of Homayuon Rawy who recreated the station within five days of the liberation of Kabul with a staff of only two dozen people not all of whom had worked in television before. But they kept their deadline of 6 p.m. last Sunday and it was Miss Shakiba whose face broke the black screen. Mr. Rawy knew how powerful this image would be even to the many who would be unable to see it who would only hear about it by word of mouth. Her first words: "This is the new Afghanistan speaking." (A woman also read the first radio newscast.) Marjan and Maryam -- now there is a generation gap. And it is Marjan's generation that will be meeting near Berlin beginning Monday trying to create the sort of broad inter-tribal government that can hold the country together for the next two years or the next two days (whichever comes first) while it slowly gives birth to something else. The old king has sent eight delegates two of them women who have been living in exile in the West. It is an old saw in this region that the genuine monarchs -- not father to son presidential successions but the old-fashioned royal kind -- have tended to provide the most "progressive" forces within their respective societies. Kuwait's emir is the guardian of a raucous Parliament. The young emir of Bahrain has turned all the political prisoners out of his gaols as well as proudly hosting the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Qatar's put up the money for the independent Arab satellite TV network Al Jazeera. The princelings of the United Arab Emirates and the Sultan of Oman are largely unafraid of the Islamists in their midst and eager to maintain Western alliances. Morocco's young king Mohammed VI is certainly the most decent person ruling in the Maghrib region. The Hashemite King Abdullah II of Jordan is the patron of a democratization movement and his Palestinian queen Rania is incidentally the most beautiful woman in the entire world. She as other queens and consorts throughout this vast Arab and Muslim universe has been quietly assertive of women's rights. She sets precedents by breaking various symbolical taboos and by ostentatiously visiting with minorities; by rolling her sleeves up and taking the risks while speaking with a divinely soft voice. The late Shah of Iran was after all deposed by the Islamists in his own country for being too secular and progressive for trying to lead ancient Persia into the modern world and getting U.S. aid to do so. He went down because he wasn't sufficiently ruthless to deal with his fanatical domestic opponents. And likewise wherever else you find royalty with the singular exception of Saudi Arabia a tension exists between democracy and freedom. For with growing freedom you are bound to get democracy with democracy the "Islamists" get their peaceful chance at power and if they get in power there is a prompt end to freedom. It is a loop that must be gone around in the hope of breaking out for there does not appear to be another way forward. But it is possible that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan has helped to break that loop. For the first time in more than a decade it seems at least outwardly that the Islamists everywhere are thrown on the defence are attacked publicly by voices that were heretofore quite silent. Afghanistan is only one remote country even to the Muslims but its reconstruction over the coming years will set an example that will be noticed far afield. We can only pray. The events yesterday near Kunduz where the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum tried to make a deal with the encircled Taliban while agents of the Tadzhik nominal president Burhanuddin Rabbani tried to cut another -- before the two sides then launched unco-ordinated attacks -- is a bad omen for the "peace talks" in Germany. These are the two most powerful old blind and ragged lions of the Northern Alliance and they are as likely as not to begin fighting each other sparking armed clashes between Uzbeks and Tadzhiks in Kabul and across the north of Afghanistan with the Taliban now deposed. In the past they have only come together for joint attacks on the Hazars or the Pashtuns. Both men are monsters both have many monsters under their command so that discreet assassinations would be a pointless policy. And once the Taliban and Al Qaeda are removed from the picture and the Americans get itchy feet to go home there will be no way on God's brown earth for foreigners to extract concessions from either man or from any of the lesser warlords. "They will do what they do do and there's no doing anything about it." But the Americans will be leaving behind the seed of a new Afghanistan a country which like Kuwait has had a taste of freedom after tyranny. Kuwait's gratitude dispersed very quickly when it became apparent that the Clinton administration had no further interest in the region or at least nothing beyond the obvious U.S. interest in keeping the oil flowing. Afghanistan may benefit from a U.S. administration with a longer attention span and which has learned some lessons from previous experience. It could get worse and then get better as domestic forces play themselves out and Afghanistan's older generation progresses towards extinction. Meanwhile the question is what happens next? Supposing as we can now reasonably suppose that at least the "Al Qaeda" problem in Afghanistan can be fixed the "war on terrorism" is still far from over. And real dramatic progress in the Middle East requires a regime change in a bigger more central country. This is the geopolitical reality though it is not necessarily the pressing tactical reality before the Bush administration. An immediate invasion of Iraq would be a good thing from a strictly moral point of view but first it must be justified diplomatically. That it can be justified by the rules of engagement that brought the U.S. planes to Afghanistan I have no doubt. While the Bush administration has been playing down its "issues" with Saddam Hussein's regime it has been doing so for tactical reasons. It makes no sense to telegraph your precise intentions before you are ready to act on them. But the long and short of it is that the U.S. has waded into an intelligence lake in Afghanistan with the capture of Al Qaeda safe houses and camps. Some idea of the rich evidence now at their disposal could be seen this week as the CIA triggered an international search that netted more than 360 fresh Al Qaeda operatives on five continents. This opened a small window on the materials now in hand and I noticed that Condoleezza Rice the U.S. national security advisor was using Saddam's name much more confidently. In particular it makes no sense to telegraph intentions to Saddam the devil we know too well. Owing to the lapse of U.N. weapons inspections of the U.N.'s sanctions programme and of the U.S. enforcement of Iraqi "no go" areas by the Clinton administration Saddam has recovered a lot of ground and is probably more dangerous today than he was when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. He has almost certainly mounted biological chemical and possibly also low-grade nuclear weapons (not proper nuclear explosives but so-called "dirty" radiative materials to be spread by conventional explosives) on the tips of his Scud fleet. He is ten years older and approaching the time of life when he is playing for keeps. Keeps I fear will mean trying to drop something on Israel. We know his psychological profile. He is not the kind of man who fails to give an adversary a reason to attack him and I think the U.S. can trust him to be their best ambassador when it comes to keeping European coalition partners onside and scaring Arab neutrals towards the U.S. alliance. I think this time the attack will be from the north and from the sea not chiefly from Saudi Arabia. (U.S. diplomacy with Turkey is now intense.) I think it will be more of an Afghan-style engagement -- air plus special forces plus local allies on the ground -- than a reprise of the Gulf War with its massed legions. But I don't think it will happen in the next few weeks for first we will see the build-up of tensions. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top