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2 Afghans mull three lousy
options By Ann Jones
KABUL -
Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan
what to expect in 2014 and you're likely to get a
scenario that falls under one of those three
headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the
double whammy in Afghanistan: the next
presidential election coupled with the departure
of most American and other foreign forces.
Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse,
while others are no less afraid that everything
will stay the same. Some even think things will
get better when the occupying forces leave. Most
predict a more conservative climate, but everyone
is quick to say that it's anybody's guess.
Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will
be a year of American
military defeat. For more
than a decade, US forces have fought many types of
wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint
invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with
Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up,
gloves-off air war. And yet, despite all the
experiments in styles of war-making, the American
military and its coalition partners have ended up
in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle
with guerrillas means defeat.
For years, a
modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of
insurgents has fought the planet's most heavily
armed, technologically advanced military to a
standstill, leaving the country shaken and its
citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of
unpalatable scenarios.
The first,
compromise, suggests the possibility of reaching
some sort of almost inconceivable power-sharing
agreement with multiple insurgent militias. While
Washington presses for negotiations with its
designated enemy, "the Taliban", representatives
of President Hamid Karzai's High Peace Council,
which includes 12 members of the former Taliban
government and many sympathizers, are making the
rounds to talk disarmament and reconciliation with
all the armed insurgent groups that the Afghan
intelligence service has identified across the
country. There are 1,500 of them.
One
member of the council told me, "It will take a
long time before we get to Mullah Omar [the
Taliban's titular leader]. Some of these militias
can't even remember what they've been fighting
about."
The second scenario, open
conflict, would mean another dreaded round of
civil war like the one in the 1990s, after the
Soviet Union withdrew in defeat - the one that
destroyed the Afghan capital, Kabul, devastated
parts of the country, and gave rise to the
Taliban.
The third scenario, collapse,
sounds so apocalyptic that it's seldom brought up
by Afghans, but it's implied in the exodus already
underway of those citizens who can afford to leave
the country. The departures aren't dramatic. There
are no helicopters lifting off the roof of the US
Embassy with desperate Afghans clamoring to get on
board; just a record number of asylum applications
in 2011, a year in which, according to official
figures, almost 36,000 Afghans were openly looking
for a safe place to land, preferably in Europe.
That figure is likely to be at least matched, if
not exceeded, when the United Nations releases the
complete data for 2012.
In January, I went
to Kabul to learn what old friends and current
officials are thinking about the critical months
ahead. At the same time, Afghan President Karzai
flew to Washington to confer with President Barack
Obama. Their talks seem to have differed radically
from the conversations I had with ordinary
Afghans.
In Kabul, where strange rumors
fly, an official reassured me that the future
looked bright for the country because Karzai was
expected to return from Washington with the
promise of American radar systems, presumably for
the Afghan Air Force, which is not yet
"operational". (He actually returned with the
promise of helicopters, cargo planes, fighter
jets, and drones.) Who knew that the fate of the
nation and its suffering citizens hinged on that?
In my conversations with ordinary Afghans, one
thing that never came up was radar.
Another term that never seems to enter
ordinary Afghan conversation, much as it obsesses
Americans, is "al-Qaeda". President Obama, for
instance, announced at a joint press conference
with President Karzai: "Our core objective - the
reason we went to war in the first place - is now
within reach: ensuring that al-Qaeda can never
again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against
America." An Afghan journalist asked me, "Why does
he worry so much about al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?
Doesn't he know they are everywhere else?"
At the same Washington press conference,
Obama said, "The nation we need to rebuild is our
own." Afghans long ago gave up waiting for the US
to make good on its promises to rebuild theirs.
What's now striking, however, is the vast gulf
between the pronouncements of American officialdom
and the hopes of ordinary Afghans. It's a gap so
wide you would hardly think - as Afghans once did
- that we are fighting for them.
To take
just one example: the official American view of
events in Afghanistan is wonderfully black and
white. The president, for instance, speaks of the
way US forces heroically "pushed the Taliban out
of their strongholds". Like other top US officials
over the years, he forgets whom we pushed into the
Afghan government, our "stronghold" in the years
after the 2001 invasion: ex-Taliban and
Taliban-like fundamentalists, the most brutal
civil warriors, and serial human rights violators.
Afghans, however, haven't forgotten just
whom the US put in place to govern them - exactly
the men they feared and hated most in exactly the
place where few Afghans wanted them to be. Early
on, between 2002 and 2004, 90% of Afghans surveyed
nationwide told the Afghan Independent Human
Rights Commission that such men should not be
allowed to hold public office; 76% wanted them
tried as war criminals.
In my recent
conversations, many Afghans still cited the first
loya jirga, an assembly convened in 2003 to
ratify the newly drafted constitution, or the
first presidential election in 2004, or the
parliamentary election of 2005, all held under
international auspices, as the moments when the
aspirations of Afghans and the "international
community" parted company. In that first
parliament, as in the earlier gatherings, most of
the men were affiliated with armed militias; every
other member was a former jihadi, and nearly half
were affiliated with fundamentalist Islamist
parties, including the Taliban.
In this
way, Afghans were consigned to live under a
government of bloodstained warlords and
fundamentalists who turned out to be Washington's
guys. Many had once battled the Soviets using
American money and weapons, and quite a few, like
the former warlord, druglord, minister of defense,
and current vice-president Muhammad Qasim Fahim,
had been very chummy with the CIA.
In the
US, such details of our Afghan War, now in its
12th year, are long forgotten, but to Afghans who
live under the rule of the same old suspects, the
memory remains painfully raw. Worse, Afghans know
that it is these very men, rearmed and ready, who
will once again compete for power in 2014.
How to vote early in
Afghanistan President Karzai is barred by
term limits from standing for re-election in 2014,
but many Kabulis believe he reached a private
agreement with the usual suspects at a meeting
late last year. In early January, he seemed to
seal the deal by announcing that, for the sake of
frugality, the voter cards issued for past
elections will be re-used in 2014.
Far too
many of those cards were issued for the 2004
election, suspiciously more than the number of
eligible voters. During the 2009 campaign, anyone
could buy fistfuls of them at bargain basement
prices. So this decision seemed to kill off the
last faint hope of an election in which Afghans
might actually have a say about the leadership of
the country.
Fewer than 35% of voters cast
ballots in the last presidential contest, when
Karzai's men were caught on video stuffing ballot
boxes. (Afterward, President Obama phoned to
congratulate Karzai on his "victory".) Only
dedicated or paid henchmen are likely to show up
for the next "good enough for Afghans" exercise in
democracy. Once again, an "election" may be just
the elaborate stage set for announcing to a
disillusioned public the names of those who will
run the show in Kabul for the next few years.
Kabulis might live with that, as they've
lived with Karzai all these years, but they fear
power-hungry Afghan politicians could "compromise"
as well with insurgent leaders like that old
American favorite from the war against the
Soviets, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who recently told a
TV audience that he intends to claim his rightful
place in government. Such compromises could stick
the Afghan people with a shaky power-sharing deal
among the most ultra-conservative,
self-interested, sociopathic, and corrupt men in
the country.
If that deal, in turn, were
to fall apart, as most power-sharing agreements
worldwide do within a year or two, the big men
might well plunge the country back into a
1990s-style civil war, with no regard for the
civilians caught in their path.
These
worst-case scenarios are everyday Kabuli
nightmares. After all, during decades of war, the
savvy citizens of the capital have learned to
expect the worst from the men currently
characterized in a popular local graffiti this
way: "Mujahideen = Criminals. Taliban =
Dumbheads."
Ordinary Kabulis express
reasonable fears for the future of the country,
but impatient free-marketeering businessmen are
voting with their feet right now, or laying plans
to leave soon. They've made Kabul hum (often with
foreign aid funds, which are equivalent to about
90% of the country's economic activity), but they
aren't about to wait around for the results of
election 2014. Carpe diem has become their version
of financial advice. As a result, they are
snatching what they can and packing their bags.
Millions of dollars reportedly take flight
from Kabul International Airport every day:
officially about $4.6 billion in 2011, or just
about the size of Afghanistan's annual budget.
Hordes of businessmen and bankers (like those who,
in 2004, set up the Ponzi scheme called the Kabul
Bank, from which about a billion dollars went
missing) are heading for cushy spots like Dubai,
where they have already established residence on
prime real estate.
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