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2 Afghans
mull three lousy options By Ann
Jones
As they take their investments
elsewhere and the American effort winds down, the
Afghan economy contracts ever more grimly,
opportunities dwindle, and jobs disappear. Housing
prices in Kabul are falling for the first time
since the start of the occupation as rich Afghans
and profiteering private American contractors, who
guzzled the money that Washington and the
"international community" poured into the country,
move on.
At the same time, a
money-laundering building boom in Kabul appears to
have stalled, leaving tall, half-built office
blocks like so many skeletons amid the scalloped
Pakistani palaces, vertical malls, and grand
madrassas erected in the past four or five years
by political and business
insiders and well-connected conservative clerics.
Most of the Afghan tycoons seeking asylum
elsewhere don't fear for their lives, just their
pocketbooks: they're not political refugees, but
free-market rats abandoning the sinking ship of
state. Joining in the exodus (but not included in
the statistics) are countless illegal emigres
seeking jobs or fleeing for their lives, paying
human smugglers money they can't afford as they
head for Europe by circuitous and dangerous
routes.
Threatened Afghans have fled from
every abrupt change of government in the last
century, making them the largest population of
refugees from a single country on the planet. Once
again, those who can are voting with their feet
(or their pocketbooks) - and voting early.
Afghanistan's historic tragedy is that its
violent political shifts - from king to communists
to warlords to religious fundamentalists to the
Americans - have meant the flight of the very
people most capable of rebuilding the country
along peaceful and prosperous lines. And their
departure only contributes to the economic and
political collapse they themselves seek to avoid.
Left behind are ordinary Afghans - the illiterate
and unskilled, but also a tough core of educated,
ambitious citizens, including women's rights
activists, unwilling to surrender their dream of
living once again in a free and peaceful
Afghanistan.
The military monster These
days, Kabul resounds with the blasts of suicide
bombers, improvized explosive devices, and
sporadic gunfire. Armed men are everywhere, in
anonymous uniforms that defy identification. Any
man with money can buy a squad of bodyguards, clad
in classy camouflage and wraparound shades, and
armed with assault weapons. Yet Kabulis, trying to
carry on normal lives in the relative safety of
the capital, seem to maintain a distance from the
war going on in the provinces.
Asked that
crucial question - do you think American forces
should stay or go? - the Kabulis I talked with
tended to answer in a theoretical way, very unlike
the visceral response one gets in the countryside,
where villages are bombed and civilians killed, or
in the makeshift camps for internally displaced
people that now crowd the outer fringes of Kabul.
(By the time US Marines surged into
Taliban-controlled Helmand Province in the south
in 2010 to bring counterinsurgency-style
protection to the residents there, tens of
thousands of them had already moved to those camps
in Kabul.)
Afghans in the countryside want
to be rid of armed men. All of them. Kabulis just
want to be secure, and if that means keeping some
US troops at Bagram Air Base near the capital, as
Afghan and American officials are currently
discussing, well, it's nothing to them.
In
fact, most Kabulis I spoke with think that's
what's going to happen. After all, US officials
have been talking for years about keeping
permanent bases in Afghanistan (though they avoid
the term "permanent" when speaking to the American
press), and American military officers now
regularly appear on Afghan TV to say, "The United
States will never abandon Afghanistan." Afghans
reason: Americans would not have spent nearly 12
years fighting in this country if it were not the
most strategic place on the planet and absolutely
essential to their plans to "push on" Iran and
China next. Everybody knows that pushing on other
countries is an American specialty.
Besides, Afghans can see with their own
eyes that US command centers, including multiple
bases in Kabul, and Bagram Air Base, only 30 miles
away, are still being expanded and upgraded.
Beyond the high walls of the US Embassy compound,
they can also see the tall new apartment blocks
going up for an expanding staff, even if
Washington now claims that staff will be reduced
in the years to come.
Why, then, would
President Obama announce the drawdown of US troops
to perhaps a few thousand special operations
forces and advisors, if Washington didn't mean to
leave? Afghans have a theory about that, too. It's
a ruse, many claim, to encourage all other foreign
forces to depart so that the Americans can have
everything to themselves. Afghanistan, as they
imagine it, is so important that the US, which has
fought the longest war in its history there, will
be satisfied with nothing less.
I was
there to listen, but at times I did mention to
Afghans that America's post-9/11 wars and
occupations were threatening to break the country.
"We just can't afford this war anymore," I said.
Afghans only laugh at that. They've seen
the way Americans throw money around. They've seen
the way American money corrupted the Afghan
government, and many reminded me that American
politicians like Afghan ones are bought and sold,
and its elections won by money. Americans, they
know, are as rich as Croesus and very friendly,
though on the whole not very well mannered or
honest or smart.
Operation Enduring
Presence More than 11 years later, the
tragedy of the US war in Afghanistan is simple
enough: it has proven remarkably irrelevant to the
lives of the Afghan people - and to American
troops as well. Washington has long appeared to be
fighting its own war in defense of a form of
government and a set of long-discredited
government officials that ordinary Afghans would
never have chosen for themselves and have no power
to replace.
In the early years of the war
(2001-2005), George W Bush's administration was
far too distracted planning and launching another
war in Iraq to maintain anything but a minimal
military presence in Afghanistan - and that mainly
outside the capital. Many journalists (including
me) criticized Bush for not finishing the war he
started there when he had the chance, but today
Kabulis look back on that soldierless period of
peace and hope with a certain nostalgia. In some
quarters, the Bush years have even acquired
something like the sheen of a lost Golden Age -
compared, that is, to the thoroughgoing
militarization of American policy that followed.
So commanding did the US military become
in Kabul and Washington that, over the years, it
ate the State Department, gobbled up the
incompetent bureaucracy of the US Agency for
International Development, and established
Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in the
countryside to carry out maniacal "development"
projects and throw bales of cash at all the wrong
"leaders."
Of course, the military also
killed a great many people, both "enemies" and
civilians. As in Vietnam, it won the battles, but
lost the war. When I asked Afghans from
Mazar-e-Sharif in the north how they accounted for
the relative peacefulness and stability of their
area, the answer seemed self-evident: "Americans
didn't come here."
Other consequences, all
deleterious, flowed from the militarization of
foreign policy. In Afghanistan and the United
States, so intimately ensnarled over all these
years, the income gap between the rich and
everyone else has grown exponentially, in large
part because in both countries the rich have made
money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have
slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic
services.
Relying on the military, the US
neglected the crucial elements of civil life in
Afghanistan that make things bearable - like
education and healthcare. Yes, I've heard the
repeated claims that, thanks to us, millions of
children are now attending school. But for how
long? According to UNICEF, in the years 2005-2010,
in the whole of Afghanistan only 18% of boys
attended high school, and 6% of girls. What kind
of report card is that? After 11 years of
underfunded work on healthcare in a country the
size of Texas, infant mortality still remains the
highest in the world.
By 2014, the defense
of Afghanistan will have been handed over to the
woeful Afghan National Security Force, also known
in military-speak as the "Enduring Presence
Force". In that year, for Washington, the American
war will be officially over, whether it's actually
at an end or not, and it will be up to Afghans to
do the enduring.
Here's where that final
scenario - collapse - haunts the Kabuli
imagination. Economic collapse means joblessness,
poverty, hunger, and a great swelling of the ranks
of children cadging a living in the streets.
Already street children are said to number a
million strong in Kabul, and 4 million across the
country. Only blocks from the Presidential Palace,
they are there in startling numbers selling
newspapers, phone cards, toilet paper, or simply
begging for small change. Are they the county's
future?
And if the state collapses, too?
Afghans of a certain age remember well the last
time the country was left on its own, after the
Soviets departed in 1989, and the US also
terminated its covert aid. The mujahideen parties
- Islamists all - agreed to take turns ruling the
country, but things soon fell apart and they took
turns instead lobbing rockets into Kabul, killing
tens of thousands of civilians, reducing entire
districts to rubble, raiding and raping - until
the Taliban came up from the south and put a stop
to everything.
Afghan civilians who
remember that era hope that this time Karzai will
step down as he promises, and that the usual
suspects will find ways to maintain traditional
power balances, however undemocratic, in something
that passes for peace. Afghan civilians are,
however, betting that if a collision comes,
one-third of those Afghan Security Forces trained
at fabulous expense to protect them will fight for
the government (whoever that may be), one-third
will fight for the opposition, and one-third will
simply desert and go home. That sounds almost like
a plan.
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