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COMMENTARY
May 11, 2002
In Afghanistan again
One begins to realize the quality of Hamid Karzai Afghanistan's interim leader and our good fortune that he is still alive when one compares him to the figures around him. The Afghan "power" ministries -- defence interior and foreign affairs -- are all in the hands of faction leaders from the Northern Alliance. Almost all have blood on their hands from the country's tortured past. Each of the country's ethnic groups in each region is under the power of a local warlord or split between rival warlords. Most of these whether or not previously affiliated with the Taliban and Al Qaeda or with the Northern Alliance continue to embrace publicly an ideology founded in fanatic "Islamism" -- the view that pure Koranic Islam makes no room for any rival religion nor any concession to secular life; and that it must be imposed with violence against any who resist. Mr. Karzai's term in office expires next month at the convening (at least in theory) of a "loya jirga" of all the Afghan tribes under the chairmanship of the former king Zahir Shah. Mr. Karzai will however be a candidate for his own succession. The most powerful single faction in Afghanistan remains the United States. No other leader but Mr. Karzai is thinkable to this faction and as the Americans were able to get their way over cursory objections at the previous round of Afghan government formation in Europe last fall we may guess that Mr. Karzai has a good chance of winning again. He has the incidental support of a wide range of the Afghan peoples -- in all tribal branches of his native Pashtuns and even across racial religious and linguistic frontiers. This cannot be a surprise he is the only thing that looks like sanity. I would not say he could win an election because the whole idea of an election in the present Afghan circumstances is too ludicrous to contemplate. On the other hand Afghanistan has its own deep tribal cultural and political traditions which are resurfacing now that they are no longer effectively suppressed by Taliban or Communists. Even people willing to kill each other on little pretext at one time of day are willing to cut a great deal of slack at another time when some advantage is offered. Often enough it just takes money. And given the extreme poverty of the country a little money goes a long way. I am celebrating corruption of course. It is not preferable to honesty but it is often preferable to homicide. One of the chief problems the U.S. and allies now face on the ground in Afghanistan is rival warlords -- those opposed to the Karzai regime those opposed to the presence of Americans those opposed to both and those merely opposed to each other -- and who are jointly and severally in the pay of Iran or occasionally other external players such as Pakistan and Russia. For while it would appear that the Al Qaeda infrastructure has been broken and its operatives are mostly on the run (generally towards Pakistan and its lawless North West Frontier but some apparently find welcome in Iran) new threats form as the old threats vanish. The chief immediate threat is from that old warhorse Gulbuddin Hekmatyar a veteran of almost every side and faction over three decades. He has done the bidding of Pakistanis and Taliban of Russians and Northern Alliance and of course plenty of his own over time. Through Pakistan's notorious intelligence service he received plenty of U.S. money and equipment during the fight against the Soviets and boasts that he still has a supply of Stingers. He briefly served as prime minister in 1992 then led a faction against another led by Ahmed Massood in a bloodbath that also devastated much of the city of Kabul. In a reprise just last month scores of his supporters were rounded up in Kabul and found to have been planting bombs as a way of welcoming the ex-king home from exile. Let me not oversimplify. There was another plot against the life of the ex-king by people associated with the serving defence minister Mohammed Fahim. Mr. Fahim in turn was the target of an assassination attempt apparently by poppy-growing interests (in which four were killed). And so forth. Mr. Hekmatyar ran off to exile in Tehran when the Taliban consolidated its power in 1996. According to the version that was publicized in newspapers the Iranians kicked him out at U.S. insistence towards the end of last year. According to the real version they sent him to Herat with a large and well-provisioned body of "economic and agricultural advisers" and as part of an ambitious plan to turn Afghanistan into something like Lebanon was in 1982 -- a death trap for U.S. soldiers. In the earlier months of this year he was reported to be recruiting among Shia Muslim tribes and others as the agent for the ayatollahs' Shia brand of militant Islamism. According to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere the U.S. is now pursuing secret talks with Iran's mad mullahs in the hope of averting future conflicts and misunderstandings. According to my information the Bush administration is using these channels to deliver serious threats. Mr. Hekmatyar's present party the Hezb-i-Islami leaflet villages and even neighbourhoods of Kandahar offering cash rewards for American scalps and threatening death to parents who allow their daughters to attend school (among other messages). Meanwhile its propaganda mouthpiece in Peshawar Pakistan tells interested inquirers that Mr. Hekmatyar only wants peace and fair elections. (And not even the Western media believe this.) In the last several weeks he has shown up repeatedly near Kabul. On Monday the CIA took a shot at him with a missile from one of their unmanned Predator aircraft and unfortunately missed though they did kill several of his lieutenants. This happened only a few kilometres west of the city. There are other warlords of whom the most visible to the Western view are those wrestling for control of eastern towns such as Khost and Gardez. They seem to have no particular ideological affiliations enjoy the occasional artillery duel park their tanks presumptuously in each other's spaces and indulge looting kidnapping blackmail rape and sundry other crimes against humanity while competing with one another in protestations of loyalty to Hamid Karzai and President George W. Bush. One of them fired a couple of missiles into Jalalabad the other day and we're still not sure what that was all about. We could start killing them but where would it end? (I am being flip about which readers sometimes complain. So pause now and imagine the human consequences of the above. Then realize that for most of the victims life is nevertheless much better than it was a mere six months ago and if the West walks out will quickly get much worse.) The overall response to this from the Bush administration is to dig in a little deeper with programmes such as those to train equip and pay a professional secular Afghan army of about 70 000 men. But even with this further Western help will be needed for Afghanistan is too poor to stand up to its enemies on its own. And there is no choice for the moment you leave Afghanistan it's back where it was. So long as Iran's ayatollahs and the like enjoy their freedom of operation the Afghan mess will be fed from the outside. Even without them it feeds from within. Until the scourge of Islamism is removed we can adopt merely expedient measures various forms of damage limitation. In the rather shocking words of a British Afghan expert a man I believe to be deeply humane: "Real progress requires that we address root causes which means putting bullets through the right foreheads." David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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