BOOK
REVIEW The
power and the
inglory Power Struggle
over Afghanistan by Kai Eide
Reviewed by Nick Turse
Somehow
I missed it. Maybe because it wasn't from the
biggest press on the planet? Or because the cover
wasn't flashy or highly stylized? Or maybe the
author's Norwegian reserve had the effect of
cloaking the book in an air of inconspicuousness?
I just don't know.
Whatever the reason, I
failed to hear advance word of Kai Eide's Power
Struggle over Afghanistan. Only after a close
friend and longtime Afghan hand told me she had
read the book and it was not to be missed did I
get hold of a copy. As usual, she was right.
One day, when the first big, retrospective
history of the US war in Afghanistan is being
written, that author is going to need to profile
Afghan President Hamid Karzai. There will be
distinct pressure to
conform to the vision of
Karzai we've been spoon-fed by the Western press
for years on end: that Karzai is erratic, isolated
from reality, or out of control. That future
author may eventually decide to paint that
portrait, but it will mean dismissing the word of
the foreign official who has probably spent the
most time with Karzai in recent years - the United
Nations special representative for Afghanistan
from 2008 to 2010, Kai Eide.
The fact that
a man who worked in Afghanistan for just two years
of a decade-plus-long war may hold such a title is
telling in itself. It's also a neon sign pointing
toward what's most important about Eide's book -
his pulling back the curtain on the war at the
highest levels.
Norwegian reserve is,
indeed, present on the page, and sometimes one
needs to read between the lines, but at its core
Power Struggle over Afghanistan is still a
very candid account of the crumbling - before
Eide's very eyes - of the relationship between the
US and Karzai and between the international
community and Afghanistan more broadly; a detailed
chronicle of repeated foreign missteps, from
killing civilians to insulting Afghanistan's
president, that occurred regularly during Eide's
tenure (not to mention before it and since).
It's hard to imagine anyone looking back
on George W Bush's war as the halcyon days of
America's most recent engagement with Afghanistan,
but Eide makes a compelling case. When the Barack
Obama administration came to power in 2009,
regular videoconferences between the Afghan and US
presidents were discontinued. Diplomacy would
instead be conducted at a lower level and Karzai
kept at arm's length. Out went friendly relations
and in came tough talk and bullying tactics under
the direction of Vice-President Joe Biden and
special envoy Richard Holbrooke.
"If the
Obama administration believed Karzai would listen
more to Washington by talking less to him, then
the new team was making a serious mistake," Eide
observes.
Humiliated by ample press
coverage of the new US attitude, the Afghan
president underwent, he writes, a transformation
from calm and thoughtful to confrontational and
prone to explosive outbursts. The Americans had
done what years of struggle against the Soviets
and the Taliban hadn't. They had literally broken
Hamid Karzai.
"The international community
had made Karzai the target of such criticism and
demonstrated such a lack of respect that I had
never witnessed anything similar," Eide recalls.
He had experienced a kind of pressure we
would find hard to understand. Civilian casualties
worried and humiliated him. When he raised such
incidents, he was told by international partners
to keep the disagreements behind closed doors.
Prominent international politicians could say that
the problem was not the insurgents, but bad
government. However, the same international
politicians had never lifted a finger to
marginalize old warlords and power brokers who had
no interest in reforms and good governance. They
criticized Karzai for corruption but continued to
make contracts with well-known corrupt Afghans.
There was a level of hypocrisy that made him
bitter and angry; his irritation seemed to grow by
the day.
Bitterness and humiliation, of
course, didn't end at the presidential palace, nor
did they begin there. For years, few in the
international community have paid much attention
to the civilian casualties and suffering in
Afghanistan. This has been especially true of
Americans.
The invisibility of the Afghan
people and the larger numbers of civilians killed
by the Taliban have contributed to a perception
that any complaints by Karzai about casualties
caused by the Americans or their coalition
partners marks the Afghan president as an ingrate.
In the US, the notion of security has,
since September 11, 2001, come to trump all, even
basic rights and civil liberties. And if a US
president, say, launches multiple wars in response
to an attack on US civilians, he's apt to be
re-elected. But there's a disconnect when it comes
to Afghanistan. If Karzai complains when civilians
in his country are killed in air strike after air
strike, it's sour grapes or incomprehensible
emotionality.
Eide, however, offers a
revealing anecdote that helps explain the
situation the Afghan president has frequently
found himself in. He relates the story of an
elderly man from a rural central province who was
arrested by coalition forces, handcuffed and
forced to march over difficult terrain. After he
was transferred to a prison in Kabul, Karzai
somehow heard about his story and invited him to
the presidential palace.
The Norwegian
diplomat writes, "At the end of his story, the old
man said, 'I don't think I'll live long enough to
see this country become our own again.' To Karzai
it was as if a knife had been sunk into his back.
The old man was humiliated by what he had
experienced, and the president was humiliated by
what he had heard."
In the end, Power
Struggle over Afghanistan is, however, no
paean to Karzai. It concludes in just the way you
would expect a story from a ruined country that
has been at war for more than three decades and
repeatedly occupied by foreign forces to end - in
disappointment. In this particular case, it's Eide
disappointed in Karzai for continued reliance on
warlords; with Karzai disappointed in Eide for not
standing up to the United States more forcefully;
with the United States groping around for
solutions after recognizing its strong-arm tactics
weren't working with Karzai; and with the Afghan
people continuing to suffer without an end to it
in sight.
Still, Power Struggle over
Afghanistan is more than simply a catalogue of
crises and controversies. Eide offers an inside
view and trenchant analysis of the inner politics
of the United Nations and the tightrope an envoy
in his position, balancing multiple Afghan and
international political interests, needs to walk
in a political minefield like Afghanistan.
He takes us inside his UN compound and
into high-level diplomatic meetings, shares his
darkest days and doesn't shy from repeated
self-criticism. Present too are revealing insights
into the minds of the many key international
players with whom he interacted, especially the
Americans, from US Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton to top generals David McKiernan and
Stanley McChrystal, ambassador Karl Eikenberry and
defense secretary Robert Gates as well as
Holbrooke.
If readers already know
something of Eide's story, they probably have a
memory of the very public war waged against him in
the press by his own deputy (and Holbrooke
intimate) Peter Galbraith - it's all in the text,
too.
Power Struggle over
Afghanistan is a uniquely candid, thoroughly
researched and important book on the war and an
indispensable resource for understanding how we
arrived at the present moment in Afghanistan. It
ought to be required reading for foreign diplomats
and military officers heading to Afghanistan,
especially Americans - with special emphasis on
this passage in which Eide reflects on his tour in
the war zone:
The most important reason for my
bitterness was my ever-growing disagreement with
Washington's strategy in Afghanistan. It had
become increasingly dominated by military
strategies, forces, and offensives. Urgent
civilian and political requirements were treated
as appendices to the military tasks. The UN had
never been really involved or consulted by
Washington on critical strategy-related
questions, nor had even the closest NATO
partners. More importantly, Afghan authorities
had mostly been spectators to the formation of a
strategy aimed at solving the conflict in their
own country.
Eide ends his book on a
positive note, claiming that while it's "easy to
despair and believe that the conflict in
Afghanistan is a lost war and that Afghanistan is
a failed state that cannot be repaired", it just
isn't so.
While he rejects the notion that
the war is already lost, one comes away believing
that Eide might protest too much. Indeed, while
the subtitle of his book is "An Inside Look at
What Went Wrong and What We Can Do to Repair the
Damage", after reading his account, repairing the
damage seems downright impossible.
To his
credit, Eide offers reasons for hope instead of
prescriptions for repairs in the book's final
pages. For the career diplomatic envoy,
Afghanistan's mammoth untapped mineral wealth,
increasingly educated youth and the rise of new
technologies offer a possible road from ruin. But
the lost war and a better future seem to have
little to do with each other.
If the
conflict in Afghanistan isn't already lost, then
it follows that somehow it can be won. Just how to
win it has been beyond the means of two
superpowers, all regional powers, and multiple
Afghan governments as well as ordinary Afghans for
three decades now.
But Eide is, of course,
right that the ultimate solution for Afghanistan
will reside with Afghans, and his book goes a long
way toward explaining why it can be only thus.
Those reasons are summed up simply and eloquently
in a text message Eide received from one of
several Afghan ministers who was visiting
Washington in the early days of the Obama
administration. That Afghan diplomat reduced the
experience to just one word, recalls Eide:
"neocolonialism".
Nick Turse is
the associate editor ofTomDispatch.com.
An award-winning journalist, his work has
appeared in the Los Angeles Times, in
The Nation, and regularly at
TomDispatch.
Power Struggle over
Afghanistan (2012) by Karl Eide. Skyhorse
Publishing, January 2012. ISBN 10: 1616084642;
US$24.95, 320 pages.
(Copyright 2012 Asia
Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
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Norwegian reserve is,
indeed, present on the page, and sometimes one
needs to read between the lines, but at its core
Power Struggle over Afghanistan is still a
very candid account of the crumbling - before
Eide's very eyes - of the relationship between the
US and Karzai and between the international
community and Afghanistan more broadly; a detailed
chronicle of repeated foreign missteps, from
killing civilians to insulting Afghanistan's
president, that occurred regularly during Eide's
tenure (not to mention before it and since).
