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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Donald Rumsfeld wants the U.S. to stay out of peacekeeping and build a national army instead. The problem is that first you need a nation.
Feb 26, 2002 | The U.S. should have gotten an early clue about how hard it would be to win the war in Afghanistan -- or even to define winning -- on the bright morning of Nov. 26, less than an hour after the city of Kunduz fell to the Northern Alliance. Instead of celebrating that important victory, rival Alliance factions began firing rockets and automatic rifles at each other in a fight over the spoils of war. A Northern Alliance fighter, seeing everyone in the main square start to panic at the violent chaos, made a point of shouting at me, "It's happy shooting. They are happy. Happy."
He said the last word in a particularly manic way, delivering it like a tennis ball aimed at my head. I told him that they didn't look very happy, since they were, after all, shooting at each other.
Moments later, the center of Kunduz was empty of everyone except gunmen.
The fighter's absurd statement was a valiant if unconvincing attempt to spin the factional fighting that gripped Kunduz that Monday morning, one of the first breakdowns of an embryonic Afghan civil order, and a harbinger of worse times to come. In fact, a larger-scale version of Kunduz that morning is exactly what the Bush administration and the international peacekeeping coalition are dealing with today. Since the rout of the Taliban government, there have been fierce outbreaks of violence between warlords, harassment of ethnic minorities and rampant banditry, as well as evidence that both Iran and Pakistan continue to exercise their influence in the politics of Afghanistan, which has been the world's boxing ring for the past quarter century. Demarcated by land mines and surrounded by lunatics, Afghanistan will know stability only if the U.S. makes an aggressive and not-at-all ambivalent commitment to building it.
And yet the U.S. seems unwilling to make that commitment. A Feb. 20 New York Times story referenced a classified CIA report warning of further chaos and fighting between warlords if ethnic tensions are not reduced. That's a straightforward observation, but exactly how to accomplish this task has apparently split the administration into two camps. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, articulating the Pentagon's hands-off view, believes that the U.S. should back the creation of a national army for Afghanistan and avoid costly peacekeeping missions.
"Why put all the time and money and effort in that?" Rumsfeld said, referring to a State Department plan to increase the number of peacekeepers and extend their reach to cities beyond Kabul. "Why not put it into helping them develop a national army so that they can look out for themselves over time?"
Rumsfeld's plan has a familiar, common-sense ring to it, like a speech given by a stern father to a no-good kid when it's time for him to get a job. It will also lead to disaster.
Although a national army is crucial for Afghanistan's long-term security, such an institution will be years in the making. To form a national army, after all, you need a nation, and the truth is that there isn't enough nation yet in the inchoate chaos known as Afghanistan to develop, control or maintain an army. Afghanistan is a patchwork of tribes and ethnicities, divided and distrustful, each with their own warlord patron who claims to be the only defense against hostile forces. Major warlords control almost every large city and its surrounding provinces -- Gul Aga Shirzai, a Pashtun, controls Kandahar; Ismail Khan, a Tajik, has Herat; and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek trained by the Soviets, is the boss of Mazar-e-Sharif -- and in this feudal system, each man has his own private gravitational field, a fuzzy security region that extends in direct proportion to his military influence, outside of which is lawlessness and banditry.
Here's a snapshot of what happens when warlords cross each other in the new regime. I'd been in Kandahar only one day when my friend Amanullah Khan stopped by with interesting news. "Something's happening," he said. "Gul Aga Shirzai and Ismail Khan are going to war. Herat and Kandahar will start fighting soon." Reports that fighters loyal to Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik, had been abusing Pashtuns had been filtering down to the Kandaharis, and they were outraged. It was Jan. 29, five days after Gul Aga had addressed a crowd of thousands in Kandahar, saying that he would wait and see what the Karzai government instructed him to do about Khan's mistreatment of Pashtuns, saying that he preferred talking to fighting. But now everyone I spoke to was expecting bloodshed. Ismail Khan was rumored to have moved his troops south from Herat into a province controlled by Gul Aga, and in response, Gul Aga had moved his forces north and the rival factions were facing each other, ready to go at any moment. Men gathering to watch Indian television at a teahouse that evening were talking excitedly about the prospect of war.
Then, just as soon as it came up, the situation resolved itself. Frantic calls were made. Beards were stroked, and the problem suddenly vanished. What caused the almost-battle, of course, did not go away. Violent reprisals against Pashtuns were not limited to Herat. In the north near Kunduz, Uzbeks under Dostum's control had been beating and robbing Pashtuns in the guise of disarmament, and the Kandaharis knew about that as well. Future warlord clashes are almost inevitable.
