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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
While Westerners dance at end-of-the-world raves, the country slips back toward anarchy -- and the Bush administration does nothing.
Oct 28, 2002 | These are the days of wild parties in Kabul, strange celebrations at the end of the world. Journalists, aid workers, diplomats and soldiers all go, and late in the afternoon at the Mustafa, the hotel where most of the freelance journalists end up, everyone tries to figure out which of the competing situations has the most promise.
The events thrown by the major news agencies always turn out to be the best supplied and least restrained by far. At the news houses, in their secure walled compounds in the Wazir Akhbar Khan, the high-rent area of the capital near the U.S. Embassy, there is always good liquor and music in fantastic abundance. Hundreds of Westerners, alerted by e-mail and satphone, show up early and dance until the midnight curfew, raving but without the chemicals, and then they either find a place to crash for the night or pile into cabs and race back to their hotels so they can get past the men with guns before curfew descends. Being stopped at a checkpoint by illiterate, stoned soldiers with Western women in the car is out of the question and the nervous Afghan drivers know this and floor it, gunning their engines through the heavily guarded traffic circles. From the back of one of their beat-up Corollas, late one night after a situation at the BBC house, I watched the black mountains of Kabul race by at 90 miles an hour, the driver putting the most unbalanced and mercenary Boston cabby to shame.
Partying in the Wazir Akhbar Khan is surreal and weightless for a Westerner who has just come in from the darkness and violence of the unstable border zone. It's a twisted version of Los Angeles: Every house has a spacious garden, some of the compounds have pools, and all of them have Afghan staff to cook, take care of security and do whatever needs to be done, and the staff are almost always pious old men, dignified and ready to help, protective of the foreign women in their houses.
Meanwhile, outside the walls of the great houses, beyond the range of the John Coltrane tracks and the warmth of single malt Scotch, Kabul and all of Afghanistan are steadily sliding back into chaos and civil war.
The seeds of the current government's destruction were sown by the American-backed victory over the Taliban, and nourished by the Bush administration's failure to devote the necessary resources to rebuilding Afghanistan. Before the bombing ever started, those knowledgeable about Afghanistan warned that massive postwar reconstruction would be necessary to prevent the nation from once again becoming a terrorist breeding ground. They warned that ancient ethnic and tribal tensions, in particular between Tajiks and Pashtuns, could quickly rage out of control. All of their grim predictions of postwar anarchy are coming true -- and America is doing nothing.
The central problem is the enmity between the Tajiks and the majority Pashtuns. Once the largely Tajik Northern Alliance took Kabul, Pashtuns who had backed the Taliban did their best to get out of the way, many fleeing to the crowded refugee camps in Pakistan. The Pashtuns who weren't political, who just wanted a better life like the rest of the city's residents, now find themselves discriminated against, the objects of scorn heaped on them by a victorious and sometimes brutal minority. Since Afghanistan is roughly 60 percent Pashtun, with many Pashtun living near border regions close to Pakistan, a larger conflict is virtually inevitable.
Pashtun warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar harness Pashtun disaffection with the new Afghan regime, and by extension the West and the United States. They will have a ready supply of recruits if Pashtuns give up on politics and turn to violence. Just a few days before the Sept. 5 bombing in Kabul and the assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai, Hekmatyar -- a famous anti-Soviet fighter with strict views on Islam and a hatred for the West -- issued a call for Pashtuns to rise up against the infidels and the new government. Hekmatyar's aim is to set up a harsh Islamic state in Afghanistan after driving out the non-Muslims. Hekmatyar has supporters in the Pashtun provinces and has been rumored to be moving around the lawless region that lies along the Pakistani frontier.
If the U.S. invades Iraq, and continues its near-abandonment of Afghanistan, support for a larger anti-Western jihad could come not just from Afghanistan but from anywhere in the Islamic world -- Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt or Pakistan, the nation that spawned the Taliban and at least one of whose intelligence agencies has a long history of radical Islamist leanings.
After the war against the Taliban ended, the promise of a massive international aid package made many Afghans feel optimistic that peace and security would be restored after more than two decades of bloodshed. Now, one year after the foreign intervention started, with only a fraction of the promised foreign aid delivered -- America ended up pledging only a paltry $296 million -- confidence in the American-backed regime of Hamid Karzai is fading fast. Unsolved bombings and assassinations have rocked the capital, and all indications are that they are not the work of al-Qaida or Taliban supporters but internal enemies of Karzai's regime -- perhaps his own defense minister. Outside of Kabul, Karzai has no control whatsoever.
