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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
And at least a few of the warlords have powerful allies. Ismail Khan, for instance, is not just your average recalcitrant Afghan gunman; Iran is covertly supplying his men with thousands of brand-new Egyptian AK-47s, in a strategy to keep him as their proxy warlord and possibly prevent the Karzai government from unifying the country. In Afghanistan's recent past, it is this proxy effect that has fueled ethnic tensions and kept the country in a state of perpetual civil war. When news of Iran's military aid to Khan made its way to the United States, the State Department warned Iran to steer clear of Afghan affairs and refrain from undermining the current regime. Journalists who asked to visit the bases where Khan's fighters were training under the guise of Iranian advisors were told bluntly to forget about it.
What does it all mean? It means the U.S./Northern Alliance victory quickly rolled Afghanistan back to a pre-Taliban boil of warlords, and the war planners are busy searching for a lid. Lately, it's come in the form of airstrikes and special forces operations, but this is not enough to arrive at a lasting peace, only the bandit peace that war-weary Afghans have to live with for now, which will likely turn many of them into supporters of warlords, however unsavory, who can keep them safe.
What must the U.S. do? Much more than it seems prepared to. And the process may well take more than a decade -- not all that long, given what the country has suffered through. First, the international security assistance force (ISAF) must grow rapidly to 100,000 troops. ISAF can, with its increased strength, branch out to cities beyond Kabul, where it has worked fairly effectively, and help restore public confidence in the civil order. In Afghanistan, the vast empty space between warlords is never secure. Most of the road separating the powers in Kabul from Gul Aga's sphere of influence, for instance, is too dangerous to drive, but the citizens don't have much choice if they need to travel from one city to another. (The technique is to leave early in the morning, drive as fast as possible and stop for absolutely nothing.) If ISAF took on the bandits and secured the roads, the gratitude of the Afghan people would go off the charts and the mission would gain enormous public support. The Taliban first gained credibility by ending banditry and road extortion in Kandahar province, and that was not an accident of history.
Next, and this is dangerous, the warlords must be completely disarmed, and Iran and Pakistan restrained by aggressive diplomacy. It should be obvious that leaving private armies in Afghanistan will result in civil war in a matter of months. Just as soon as the Americans and ISAF return home, the fuse will light and Afghans will re-experience the horrors of 1992-93, the worst years of the civil war. Armed principalities don't make a nation.
The list of critical next steps seems to go on without end. Protection from famine and drought. Medicine and basic health care. Representative government. The creation of national institutions like an army. Afghanistan has a young population desperately in need of work and willing to do it. There are all manner of things to build -- roads, hospitals, schools -- and an organization similar to the WPA is the way to start the process. Our help rebuilding the country offers us a measure of redemption from our complicity in its destruction, going back to the war against the Soviets, and our subsequent abandonment of Afghanistan during the last decade.
The cornerstones of a peaceful Afghanistan are not so distant as they would seem, but it requires what they call in the aid business "a sustained commitment." And there is good reason to fear that the administration, which has already eschewed nation-building as overly expensive and a general pain in the ass, will give Afghanistan a token of its affection and then simply move on to the next crisis. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and significant public pressure might alter the U.S. government's posture in the region. It's also certain that the administration's either-or take on how to help Afghanistan -- peacekeepers or the foundation of a national army -- is a mistake. Peace will require both.
When I was in Afghanistan, soldiers often came up to me with the same question: Will America help us rebuild? Ashamed, I had to say that I didn't know the answer. It should, of course, be yes. Throughout both my stays there, I saw the way Afghans treated journalists as their couriers to the West, saying to us, "Tell them that we need security, clean water. Tell them we want to live in peace." We had to make sure to write it all down. Every request was made with a visceral longing for what we live with day after day, and we took these messages back in notebooks and tried not to forget them. It is miraculous that more Afghans are not bitter about what they have gone through, that so many look to the future with a fair measure of hope.
It seemed to me that for many of the Afghans I met, the meaning of peace transcended the absence of war. The word promised a resurrection of their civilization.
That was another message I came home deterrmined to deliver.
