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COMMENTARY
February 28, 2002
Making peace
Except war peace is the most dangerous condition for a people at peace grows accustomed to its safety and tranquillity and comes to think of peace as a natural condition. By increments war comes to seem unnatural which it may be in heaven. On earth war can only be prevented by warlike means by the provision of defences so impregnable that no potential aggressor will even think of trying. The very attack on New York was according to Osama bin Laden attempted because U.S. defences were down -- because previous U.S. administrations had demonstrated in Vietnam Lebanon Iraq Somalia that they would walk away from trouble. Even after the earlier terrorist attempt to bring down the World Trade Centre in 1993 then more successful attacks on U.S. embassies barracks and a ship abroad the U.S. declined a vigorous hot pursuit. In that sense alone the U.S. "had it coming" on Sept. 11. This "real world" reminder is necessary to understand what is happening in Afghanistan now. There is a disjunction between reality and perception as we take our view of a messy situation on the ground. The media declared a protracted war and then the U.S. quickly prevailed. The media then declared the war to be over and it continues still. Naturally having been wrong twice phase three will be I told you -- that "you see we were right this war does last forever". But the clean-up in Afghanistan is proceeding at the same pace as the previous operations no quicker than is possible. First be it observed there are two wars here. The one that concerns us is the war on terrorism and to prevail all that is necessary in Afghanistan is to hold Kabul and Kandahar with a reasonably sympathetic government and thus keep the doors open to military operations against Al Qaeda or its allies wherever they may appear. The British lead a 4 000 strong peacekeeping force in the streets of Kabul and the Americans have 3 000 essentially performing that task for Kandahar in alliance with local warlord Gul Agha. It is only everywhere else that we find total chaos. For the other war is that between the Afghans themselves about who does and doesn't want a modern "civil society" on the Western model. This is up to them it is not our affair. Whether there is any faint possibility of resolution will appear next month when the former king Zahir Shah lands in Kabul to summon a loya jirga which in turn will try to hammer out arrangements for the future post-June. Either we shall or shan't see the will among Afghans themselves to pull the divergent pieces of Afghanistan into a nation see compromises offered and accepted. It is still too early to guess what will happen that far ahead. For the moment the chaos is compounded by the overlay of the two wars. For truth to tell the Americans and Hamid Karzai often find themselves on either side of local conflicts. In Jalalabad and Gardeyz for instance the U.S. is effectively backing warlords against competitors more loyal to Mr. Karzai because the "Yankee's warlords" are offering more help ferreting out surviving Taliban and Al Qaeda cells. There is no way around this simple tragedy: the U.S. priority has got to be the pursuit of its own enemies Mr. Karzai's the succour of his own friends. The much-publicized American mistake when 16 members of a force avowedly loyal to Mr. Karzai were killed in an exchange with U.S. soldiers was a consequence of this confusion. For they were also enemies of Bacha Khan the unlikeable local warlord who happens to have been offering very useful services to the Americans sweeping his province of Paktia where from the little we know Osama bin Laden may yet be in hiding. The victims were most assuredly armed they shot first -- and there are no armed innocents in that part of Afghanistan. It was necessary to incarcerate the survivors for more than a week just to establish what had happened. More such mistakes are inevitable as we look west across the country. The most worrying challenge comes from Herat where a powerful warlord Ismail Khan enjoys support from Iran -- evident in substantial arms shipments and the increasing appearance of Iranian "advisers". Mr. Karzai may want to cut a deal with him and may have tried to advance this agenda when he went to Tehran last week. In Mazar-i-Sharif in the north Rashid Dostum (Russia's old friend) is the regional nightmare. He is very consciously playing the U.S. off against Mr. Karzai's weak government. A similar mess is emerging over drug production of great interest to the Americans but necessarily a low priority in Kabul. Over the last couple of decades Afghanistan has been to heroin production what the U.S. has been as a military power: pre-eminent and unchallengeable. In its later stages the Taliban regime went after the poppy farmers as they went after the standing Buddhas at Bamiyan. But the effect was temporary and with the Taliban gone no regional warlord has an interest in reducing the cash benefit in which he shares from a crop that offers one of the finest returns on equity in the annals of agriculture. This is a topic much mooted by Zalmay Khalilzad President Bush's Afghan-born special envoy in Kabul. But Mr. Karzai's response is inevitably you give me the tools and I'll do the job. Mr. Karzai who would genuinely like to be more helpful to the Americans who installed him has hands quite tied. He is almost the only operator within Afghanistan without a private army. He is performing a very impressive tapdance with his free feet between irreconcilable armed interests; and so long as he's alive he's winning. The Europeans in their usual helpful way see the need for a massive extension of peacekeeping forces but aren't willing to provide them. The Americans on the ground see the only solution is to blow your way in by force of arms. That is why they propose to help assemble a viable Afghan army as their parting gift. They are sensibly hesitant to begin blowing however until they can see more clearly what new enemies they may have. Meanwhile they'll get on with the enemies they have already. We for our part observing at a safe distance wish to assign blame when something goes wrong. But nothing has gone wrong recently. The situation on the ground in Afghanistan has been wrong since at least 1973. It was intractable when the U.S. arrived and is a little less intractable now. It will take time and patience to sort it all out. For peace like war requires to be created in successive painful stages. It doesn't happen on its own. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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