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Warlords stand in the
way
By Sonali Kolhatkar
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
"If you harbor a terrorist, if you support a
terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you're just as
guilty as the terrorists. And the Taliban found out what
we meant." - US President George W
Bush , speaking to military personnel in Fort
Stewart on September 12.
But now all Afghans
have found out what it means, as United States-backed
warlords keep alive the Taliban's legacy: Two years
after the start of US bombing to topple the Taliban, the
US is replacing the former terrorist state with yet
another of its own design.
Less than a year away
from planned elections in Afghanistan, UN rapporteur
Miloon Kothari accused US-backed Afghan warlords of
demolishing homes and grabbing land. Kothari named
Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim and
Education Minister Younis Qanooni as offenders, calling
for their removal from office this September 13. In a
quick backpedal, however, the head of the UN in
Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said a day later that
Kothari had gone too far in naming ministers.
US-backed warlords keep alive Taliban's
legacy
Still, Kothari's accusation confirms what
human rights and political organizations have been
repeating for months. The Afghan Human Rights
Commission, established by US-backed Afghan leader Hamid
Karzai this June, also corroborates the demolishing,
calling it a "clear abuse of human rights". The BBC
correspondent to Afghanistan said the accusation of
bulldozing homes "has hit a nerve among Afghans, tens of
thousands of whom are homeless after more than two
decades of war. Many have just returned from refugee
camps in Pakistan and Iran to find their homes occupied
by commanders and their cronies."
But who are
Qasim Fahim, Younis Qanooni and the various other men,
distinguished by the title of warlords? Many were
commanders in the Northern Alliance opposition to the
Taliban. Fahim and Qanooni are both successors to Ahmed
Shah Masoud, the charismatic warlord hailed by many as
the probable future leader of Afghanistan in a
post-Taliban nation, had he lived. He was assassinated
shortly before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US,
apparently by al-Qaeda. Masoud was the most powerful
figure in the mujahideen party Jamiat-i Islami and was
involved in the indiscriminate killing of thousands of
civilians during the civil war of 1992-1996. For
example, according to the US State Department's 1996
report on human rights practices in 1995, "Masoud's
troops went on a rampage, systematically looting whole
streets and raping women" after the capture of Kabul's
predominantly Hazara neighborhood of Karte Seh.
The cooperation of warlords such as Fahim and
Qanooni was central to US Operation Enduring Freedom,
and in fact they were paid off by the US and Britain in
return for supporting Karzai and fighting against the
Taliban. In July 2002, the UK Observer "learnt that 'bin
bags' full of US dollars have been flown into
Afghanistan, sometimes on RAF planes, to be given to key
regional power brokers who could cause trouble for Prime
Minister Hamid Karzai's administration. Paying the
warlords for their services has triggered clashes among
groups eager to win patronage from the United States. In
some areas commanders have been told they will receive a
top-of-the-range $40,000 pick-up truck - a local status
symbol - if they can prove they have killed Taliban or
al-Qaeda elements."
In addition to monetary and
other bribes, former Northern Alliance commanders were
rewarded with high positions in the Afghan government.
Fahim and Qanooni won their posts as ministers of
defense and education in the summer 2002 loya
jirga (council) to select a transitional government,
where US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad played a central
role to ensure that Karzai and the Northern Alliance
remained in power. But no sooner had the Taliban been
defeated than Fahim's men were busy looting cash and
other equipment sent to the central interim government.
Fahim has also been keeping the Taliban's legacy alive.
According to Human Rights Watch, in December 2002,
troops loyal to Fahim "have been enforcing Taliban-era
'moral' restrictions" such as "forbidding families from
playing music at weddings and dancing, and in some cases
arresting and beating musicians".
Clearly the
cooperation of these warlords has come at a price that
the Afghan people are bearing. According to Brad Adams,
executive director of the Asia Division of Human Rights
Watch, "Human rights abuses in Afghanistan are being
committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into
power by the United States and its coalition partners
after the Taliban fell in 2001."
Afghans
suffering from government abuses
Loya
jirga citizen delegate Omar Zakhilwal, in a
Washington Post opinion piece on the naming of Karzai as
president and the doling out of top posts to Northern
Alliance commanders, asked the following question: "Will
the new government be dominated by the same warlords and
factional politics responsible for two decades of
violence and impunity, or can we break with this legacy
and begin to establish a system of law and professional
governance?"
Unfortunately, the answer to
Zakhilwal's question is the former scenario of
domination by warlords in the government, assisted by US
policies. The expansion of the multilateral
International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) outside
the capital Kabul, which could have reduced the power of
the warlords, has been stymied by the US for over a
year, despite warnings from the international community,
non-governmental organizations, ordinary Afghans, and
even Karzai. The mounting insecurity in the countryside
has left ordinary Afghans still desperate for relief,
not simply from Taliban remnants and lack of resources,
but primarily from members of a government foisted upon
them by their so-called "liberators".
A report
released in July by Human Rights Watch entitled "Killing
You is a Very Easy Thing for Us" details the abuses of
Afghan civilians at the hands of the US-backed
warlord-ministers. "The testimony of victims and
witnesses implicates soldiers and police under the
command of many high-level military and political
officials in Afghanistan. These include Mohammad Qasim
Fahim, the minister of defense; Hazrat Ali, the military
leader of the Eastern Region; Younis Qanooni, the
minister of education; Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former
president of Afghanistan; and Abdul Rabb al-Rasul
Sayyaf, a powerful former mujahideen leader to whom many
of the officials involved in the documented abuses in
Kabul city and province remain loyal."
The most
vulnerable members of Afghan society have felt little
relief since the toppling of the Taliban in 2001. Two
million refugees have returned to Afghanistan,
encouraged by the UNHCR (United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees) and their countries of
residence. In some cases refugees were coerced to
return. For most, the return home has been met with
disappointment due to poverty, joblessness and lack of
housing. Afghan women and girls, while enjoying a
certain measure of freedom since the Taliban's reign
ended, still feel threatened. HRW interviewed hundreds
of women and girls and discovered that "on many
occasions when Human Rights Watch asked women and girls
if they were, in fact, studying, working, and going out
without burqas [veils], many said that they were
not. This was especially true in rural areas. Most said
this was because armed men have been targeting women and
girls. Men and women told Human Rights Watch that women
and older girls could not go out alone and that when
they did go out they had to wear a burqa for fear
of harassment or violence, regardless of whether they
would otherwise choose to wear it. And in Jalalabad and
Laghman, certain government officials have threatened to
beat or kill women who do not wear it."
Additional abuses of Afghan civilians include
arbitrary arrests; torture; kidnapping; rape; armed
robbery; home invasions; extortion of shop keepers, taxi
drivers, truck and bus drivers; beatings; illegal
seizure, and land occupation. There have also been
political threats and arrests, press restrictions, and
other violations of democratic and human rights. HRW
summarizes, "Although many observers have noted the
harmful effects of chronic insecurity in Afghanistan,
few have sufficiently appreciated the extent to which
continuing insecurity, at its heart, is due to policies
and depredations of local government actors. Human
Rights Watch found evidence of government involvement or
complicity in abuses in virtually every district in the
southeast, ... [but] serious human rights violations of
the kind detailed in this report are not confined to the
southeast - they are taking place throughout Afghanistan
... Many prominent Afghan commanders, officials and
former mujahideen leaders, including officials in the
Afghan Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Interior, and
the intelligence agency, the Amniat-e Melli, are
responsible for or are implicated in many of the abuses
..."
On the second anniversary of the US bombing
of Afghanistan this October 7, the status of the first
target in the "war on terror" is nothing for Bush and
friends to write home about. To date, none of the
warlords has ever been held accountable for terrorizing
the Afghan population. They have instead been rewarded
by the US with high-level positions in the government.
Bush, in his address to US military personnel in Fort
Stewart on September 12, said: "In Afghanistan, America
and our broad coalition acted against a regime that
harbored al-Qaeda and ruled by terror ... Thanks to our
men and women in uniform, Afghanistan is no longer a
haven for terror." But far from liberating the Afghan
people, the US has clearly ensured that terror remains
alive in Afghanistan. Washington has empowered Karzai, a
Pashtun leader representative of the demographics of the
largest ethnic majority, and crippled him by
simultaneously empowering warlords with ugly human
rights records. These warlords have predictably returned
to old practices with impunity.
Afghans
warned of warlord abuses
"We were happy after the
collapse of the Taliban ... We thought there would be
peace and stability. But nothing has changed ... [Afghan
warlords] fight among themselves for their own goals.
Their victims are innocent people. We are very angry,"
said 25-year-old Tajik Rasood, who was shot one year ago
in the cross fire of resumed in-fighting between
warlords.
In its statement in November 2001,
soon after the fall of the Taliban, the Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) said,
"The world should understand that the Northern Alliance
[NA] is composed of some bands who did show their real
criminal and inhuman nature when they were ruling
Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 ... The NA will horribly
intensify the ethnic and religious conflicts and will
never refrain to fan the fire of another brutal and
endless civil war in order to retain power." Clearly, as
Human Rights Watch and other organizations prove, RAWA's
prediction has come true.
Only a few days before
RAWA issued its statement, the US Department of State
released a fact sheet on the "Taliban's Betrayal of the
Afghan People". In it were listed in detail the crimes
committed by the Taliban, and RAWA's documentation of
Taliban crimes was cited, including its vast online
database of photos, videos and testimonies. Strangely,
while the State Department found RAWA's documentation of
Taliban crimes credible enough to cite, it has not made
a single mention of RAWA's extensive documentation of
the crimes of Northern Alliance warlords, such as
Qanooni, Fahim, Masoud, and others.
RAWA's
position is bolstered by voices from among the Afghan
public. A survey conducted by the Center for Economic
and Social Rights (CESR) in May 2002 found that many
Afghans "expressed concern that the UN had sanctioned
the return to power of brutal and corrupt warlords, both
in Kabul and at the local level. They insisted that
without an international force to maintain peace, disarm
warlords, oversee the transition to a more
representative government, and establish mechanisms for
human rights accountability, Afghanistan was likely to
slide into renewed war once the world's attention
shifted to the next global crisis." That crisis came in
the form of the war on Iraq and today Afghans' worst
fears have been realized.
Bleak
future
Afghanistan was a test case for the US war
in Iraq, hailed as a success story by Bush, US Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US "warlords". But
clearly the lessons learned have not been how best to
stabilize a country to pave the way for democracy,
rather on how best to create havoc through purposeful
negligence and criminal government actors, with the
prime losers being ordinary, war-weary civilians. In the
CESR survey, only 20 percent of Afghans thought that
Afghan authorities, either central or local, should be
primarily responsible for reconstruction efforts to
ensure human rights. "These results reflect deep
distrust of government authorities but also high hopes
that the international community will follow through on
public commitments to assist Afghanistan."
Unfortunately, the high hopes of the Afghan
people have been dashed. In a Tokyo meeting in early
2002, donor countries pledged $4.5 billion in aid to
Afghanistan over 2.5 years. This translated into $40 to
$80 per capita, and is a pittance compared with the $200
to $300 per capita pledged to victims of conflict in the
Balkans, Occupied Palestine and East Timor. In fact, the
World Bank and UN have estimated the war-ravaged
country's reconstruction needs at between $13 billion
and $19 billion. Additionally, much of the original $4.5
billion from the pledges made in Tokyo has not come
through, with donors citing security concerns, hampered
of course by US refusal to expand the ISAF. Recently, in
response to growing criticism, the Bush administration
pledged $1.2 billion to reconstruction efforts in
Afghanistan. Contrast this number with the $11 billion
allocated for the military operation in Afghanistan.
Aside from reconstruction and other serious
physical needs, an Afghan dream of peace and democracy
remains unattainable, clashing with the interests of the
world's only super-power-empire. Efforts to draft a new
constitution and preparations for elections in 2004 will
be seriously deterred in the current climate of fear
generated by US-backed Afghan warlords - unless there is
an immediate disarmament or intervention by the
international community. Already Karzai has postponed
the approval of a new Afghan constitution by two months,
and the current draft has not even been made public.
As it did in Iraq, Washington has clearly
thwarted any attempts to bring stability or democracy to
the country it claims to have liberated. An engineer
from the Ghazi province reflected on the future of
Afghanistan, a future that is doomed unless US policies
are drastically changed: "In the loya jirga, 85
percent of the elected were with the warlords, or were
warlords. If the international community takes no action
to correct this situation, those elected in the [2004]
elections will be 100 percent warlords."
The
same engineer also asked some crucial questions: "Will
warlordism end, or will it grow stronger? Will the ISAF
and the US deal with warlordism, or let it strengthen?
What assurances can we have for future elections?" The
answers to these questions will determine whether the
Afghan people are destined for peace and democracy, or
for continued devastation engineered by their so-called
"liberator," the United States.
Sonali
Kolhatkar sonali@afghanwomensmission.org>
is a founding director of the Afghan Women's Mission,
a nonprofit organization that works in solidarity with
Afghan women on political and social issues. She is also
the host and producer of KPFK Pacifica Radio's daily
prime time morning program "Uprising".
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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