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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
"Taliban" author Ahmed Rashid says the Bush administration is risking the success of its war on terror by scheming against Iraq's Saddam Hussein while Afghanistan is still in ruins.
Apr 1, 2002 | Long before Sept. 11, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was trying to warn the world of the dangers of Afghanistan and the ruling Taliban. His 1999 book, "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," was a cautionary tale about the new wave of Islamic fundamentalism that the movement represented, and the potential dangers it posed for the rest of Central Asia and the world.
Like New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Rashid is convinced that Western engagement in Afghanistan and Central Asia is the answer to sustained peace in the region. While analysts like journalist Robert Kaplan advocate a more hands-off approach, Rashid argues that the war on terrorism cannot be fought simply with military power, but must also involve significant economic and diplomatic intervention. And he is alarmed at the United States' half-hearted commitment to that kind of thoroughgoing engagement in war-devastated Afghanistan.
Rashid is a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review and London's Daily Telegraph. He is also co-founder of the newly created Open Media Fund for Afghanistan, which aims to rebuild professional local media in the wake of the Taliban's rule.
Salon met with Rashid here in Seattle, where he was promoting his new book, "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia." As he drank tea and chain-smoked Dunhills, Rashid gave his assessment of the current situation in Afghanistan and aired his frustrations at the United States, which he criticized for vainly trying to marshal support for extending its war to Iraq while it has so much unfinished business in Afghanistan.
What has it been like for you to watch the world try to give itself a crash course in Afghanistan, which you've been covering for more than 20 years?
It's a kind of vindication, of sorts, except that it's on the back of such horrible circumstances, Sept. 11 and all of that. I wish these warnings had been heeded before. The Taliban book was a warning. OK, it didn't predict 9/11, but it did say if you leave Afghanistan to itself, it's going to be a disaster for the whole region.
You've been critical of America's handling of Afghanistan since the bombing stopped. What should the Americans be doing differently?
[U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld has reiterated every second day that the war is still on. Well, the war is over in Afghanistan. What we're left with now is a kind of mopping-up effort in a very small area of the country, which is basically two or three provinces in eastern Afghanistan out of a total of 32 provinces.
If you look at Operation Anaconda, the war zone was about 15 square miles. If the ordinary American saw it on a screen, you'd think that all of Afghanistan was still at war. I was in Kabul during Anaconda, and 95 percent of the population was totally unaffected. Yeah, that's where al-Qaida and Taliban are, and there's a threat there, no doubt, but the rest of the country is relatively peaceful. So what I'm trying to say is that the Americans, by insisting that the war is still on, are not allowing the other processes to take off.
The other problem is that other arms of the U.S. government should be involved in the policy -- the State Department, AID [the U.S. Agency for International Development], they're not in the decision-making process. The Pentagon is still making the policy. I think [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz is basically running this policy, and he's taking a very hard line.
What's very disturbing to me, and I think to many Afghans, is that [Secretary of State Colin] Powell has not made a statement on Afghanistan in the last four or five weeks. The only statements of policy are coming from the Pentagon. Where is the State Department?
