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Holdup at the ballot
box
By Pepe Escobar
The Bush
administration is now "suggesting" that the elections
scheduled for June in Afghanistan - for which the
administration itself pushed - may have to be postponed
because of "security problems". There's much more to
this than a huge understatement.
Not only a
third of the country - as Washington says - is unstable,
but practically everywhere outside of the capital Kabul.
Security advisers for international aid agencies reveal
every week what's really happening. Except for the
Kabul-Jalalabad road, to travel overland in Afghanistan
is still a very dangerous undertaking. Even the recently
rebuilt and repaved Kabul-Kandahar road is considered
dangerous.
According to the United Nations, at least 70 percent of
10.5 million eligible Afghan voters should be registered for
the elections to be considered credible. But at the
moment, Afghan registration workers are not even capable
of fulfilling their mission in most parts of the country.
The administration of US President George W Bush now says
that "at least the presidential election" can take place
in June, or maybe July. Bushites are "advising" the
government of Hamid Karzai on the matter.
According to Kabul sources, Karzai himself seems
reasonably sure to win a presidential election. Wishful
thinking in Washington rules that Karzai will be
"re-elected" - he was in fact imposed as president by
the Bush administration - with broad support among
average Afghans. No evidence suggests that most Afghans
even know what Hamid Karzai stands for - apart from the
fact that he is widely referred to as "the kebab
seller".
Parliamentary elections - supposing
that they are free and fair - will pose a tremendous
problem to the Bushites. Former mujahideen are all
masters of new political forces in Afghanistan - and
none of them are aligned with Karzai. They include
Muhamad Fahim, the powerful defense minister and former
number two to assassinated Northern Alliance commander
Ahmad Shah Masoud; Yunous Qanoni, the education
minister; Ishmail Khan, the governor of Herat (and the
surrounding western provinces for that matter); and
general Rashid Dostum, Uzbek-backed and the virtual
owner of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif and
environs. They have all mounted electoral challenges
against Karzai. Moreover, all former mujahideen
commanders still maintain their own extensive private
armies. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of the Hezb-i-Islami
Afghanistan, former mujahideen and now branded a
terrorist by Washington, was in control of 25 percent of
the members of last December's loya jirga (grand
council), as well as four local governors. The loya
jirga ratified a new constitution for the country
that gives future presidents wide-reaching powers.
Hekmatyar also commands loads of weapons and thousands
of warriors and is effectively leading the Afghan
resistance.
Karzai's weapon of choice has been
to distinguish between "good Taliban" - who accounted
for at least 40 percent of the members of the loya
jirga - and "bad Taliban" - who are responsible for
the relentless anti-government and anti-American
guerrilla war raging in the south and southeast.
Afghan witnesses repeatedly tell of Taliban
militia invading Afghan territory and coming from
Pakistani positions across the border - something that
suggests a secret tribal deal. These "bad Taliban"
discarded their flowing white turbans long ago: they
wear the pakool, the felt beret which is a
mujahideen icon.
The timetable for any sort of
election by the end of June favors only one player: the
Bush administration, so that they can exit the country
as quickly and quietly as possible before presidential
elections in November.
The guerrillas - or
jihadis - know this very well, and that's why Hekmatyar
won't accept any deal to lay down his arms and join the
government. Asia Times Online reported on Wednesday (Afghanistan: When push comes to shove
) that Hekmatyar had been made such a
deal from the US. Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United
Nations coordinator in Afghanistan who has just
completed a mission as UN envoy to Iraq, is on record as
saying that there can be no quick fix, election-wise, in
either Afghanistan or Iraq.
Taliban commander
Mullah Dadullah - one of leader Mullah Omar's top
lieutenants and a member of the 10-member shura
council established by the Taliban in 2003 - told
Reuters by satellite telephone: "There is no question of
the Taliban talking to anyone until the American forces
leave our country." Dadullah is definitely not the
compromising kind. He is blamed by Kabul for the killing
of an El Salvadorian Red Cross worker in May last year,
and worse still the destruction of the two giant Bamiyan
Buddhas in March 2001. He claims that Mullah Omar is
still in Afghanistan - probably protected by concentric
circles of tribesmen in the mountains north of Kandahar
- and in full contact with his commanders.
Attacks conducted by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and
Hekmatyar's forces in eastern and southern Afghanistan,
alongside Pakistan's tribal areas, happen almost daily.
The arc extends from Zabol, in the Afghan south, and
runs north through the provinces of Paktika, Paktia,
Nangarhar and Kunar (a possible hideout of Osama bin
Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri). The Afghan
resistance's rearguard bases are in the neighboring
Pakistani tribal areas, from Zhob in the south to
Kohistan in the north, through South Waziristan (another
region where bin Laden might be hiding), North
Waziristan, Kurram and Khyber. The Taliban are
infiltrating all over these areas, non-stop. Since last
year, the Musharraf government has prohibited access to
journalists, especially the foreign press.
And
then there's opium, which accounts for half of
Afghanistan's gross national product. The country,
post-Taliban, has reverted to its status of a de facto
narco-state. According to the UN Office of Drugs and
Crime, Afghanistan's opium production in 2002 was worth
US$20 billion; farmers nonetheless received only $1.2
billion out of the total. The official Afghan economy
grew 30 percent in 2002, but if one adds the opium trade
the percentage rises to 60 percent. In 2003 it was no
different - it should yield huge profits from the best
opium harvest in Afghanistan in years.
UN and
US diplomats maintain that the poppy fields benefit
the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Afghan warlords and their
private armies. They conveniently forget to mention that
the trade also benefits former Northern Alliance
commanders reconstructed into Kabul bureaucrats. North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan have
no mandate to fight drug trafficking. As Karzai, NATO
and the US military are not saying or doing anything,
Afghan farmers keep doing business as usual. However, a
new task force, apparently trained by the British, has
swung into operation, but its results are not yet known.
Kabul sources confirm that Afghanistan is back
to its early 1990s chaos following the withdrawal of
Soviet troops after a decade of occupation. Al-Qaeda -
rather Fath al-Islam (Victory for Islam) - is hiding in
mountain headquarters, most probably in Kunar province.
Kunar - a succession of mountains and remote valleys -
is an extension of Nuristan, in whose own remote valleys
anthropologists believe is imprinted the genetic code of
the Greeks who battled for Alexander the Great and then
stayed behind after he went back to Mesopotamia.
On the Pakistani side of Kunar one finds Dir,
the main city in the northern part of Northwest Frontier
Province. It is here, in the Chitral area, that the
backup forces of Hekmatyar are concentrated. Already in
September 2002 (see Exit Osama: enter Hekmatyar)
Asia Times Online broke the story that Hekmatyar, the
Taliban and al-Qaeda were united in a jihad to expel the
Americans. The situation remains pretty much the same:
the anti-American jihad binds together Hekmatyar,
al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the mullahs who control the
Pakistani madrassas (religious schools), and
hardline sectors of the Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI).
The Busharraf factor
Amid the ups and downs of the extremely ambiguous
relationship between the government of Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf and the Karzai
government, only one variable remains unchanged: "strategic
depth". Only a few days after September 11, 2001,
an intelligence source in Islamabad told Asia Times
Online: "Pakistan simply cannot delink from the Taliban,
and the Taliban delink from the ISI. Historically,
whenever the ISI felt that some groups were going out of
their control, they tried to politically divide them.
Hardliners will go behind the scenes, and a new
leadership will be brought in." Two-and-a-half years
after September 11, that's exactly what's happening. The
"good Taliban" are already at work in Kabul and the main
Afghan cities, and they have been influential in the
loya jirga. The "bad Taliban" take an active part
in the guerrilla war in the south and southeast. Either
way, the ISI has nothing to lose.
For
the hardline sectors of the ISI - a government within
a government - Afghanistan means nothing apart
from "strategic depth" in the endless war of
attrition against India. For ISI hardliners, and even
for Musharraf himself, there's only one possible outcome
in Kabul: a pliable, Pashtun-dominated,
pro-Islamabad, anti-Delhi government. But an inefficient,
isolated Karzai is not such a bad alternative. In the
unlikely event US and NATO troops leave Afghanistan, the
inevitable destiny of the Karzai government is already
written on the walls of madrassas in and around
Peshawar - more than 2,000 Koranic schools. Conservative
Islam operates in this complex environment through a mix
of illegal traffic of drugs and weapons and a reserve of
hundreds of thousands of hardcore Islamists.
Pakistan has revealed itself to be the worlds'
leading nuclear proliferator. But nothing will happen to
"Busharraf" - as many people in Pakistan call him -
because the Pakistani strongman is George W Bush's man
in Islamabad.
Musharraf is the living proof of
the Bush administration's lies which justified the Iraqi
invasion: we will bring democracy to Islamic lands and
we will curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
But the fact is, Pakistan is a nuclear proliferator
state - unlike Iran or even Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And
Pakistan is no democracy - it is ruled by a general with
dictatorial powers.
The Bush
administration's main reason to support Musharraf is to have bin
Laden delivered on a plate before the US presidential
elections. Sources confirm to Asia Times Online that
hardline sectors of the ISI are absolutely sure of the
exact whereabouts in the tribal areas of bin Laden and
al-Zawahiri. But for the Musharraf system to pass this
information to the Americans is out of the question: it
is the key to keep Washington's support. In the unlikely
event Musharraf hands bin Laden to Washington, his
"presidency" would be terminated by Islamic hardliners
well before Pakistan's 2007 elections for the National
Assembly. Pakistanis have been voicing their preference
for an elected president well before September 11. But
the Bushites obviously prefer Musharraf.
Afghanistan swirls with rumors - including
the far-fetched possibility that Taliban and
al-Qaeda fighters are escaping through the mountains of
the Afghan northeast towards Xinjiang in China.
Meanwhile, all bets are off concerning the imminent
spring offensive - which in fact consists of two
offensives: the "bad Taliban", Arab-Afghan fighters
and Hezb-i-Islami ranks, under Hekmatyar's command on
one side, against NATO forces on the other side.
The ultimate price is not so much political and
military control over Afghanistan as the 1,700-kilometer
Trans-Afghan-Pipeline (TAP) that will carry gas from
Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to a Pakistani port.
Karzai, as it is well known, is also a
US citizen. He was once a manager at US oil giant
Unocal, and he failed to convince the Taliban when they
ruled Afghanistan to build the TAP. After being imposed
as Afghan president by the White House
and Pentagon-connected Zalmay Khalilzad - today the US
ambassador in Kabul - Karzai signed a treaty with
Musharraf and Turkmenistan's Saparmurat Niyazov in late
2001, pledging their common support to TAP. Turkmenistan
again has delayed any action until June: Niyazov
certainly wants to know who will be the clear winner
after the spring offensive(s). Should the Taliban end up
getting a piece of the action, sources in Turkmenistan
say that the flamboyant Turkmenbashi - as the leader is
known - will be laughing all the way to the bank. As for
Musharraf, he doesn't care with whom he does business -
as long as he keeps "strategic depth".
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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