Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

  For form’s sake, two other candidates got listed and gave brief speeches at the podium. One was a woman named Masooda Jalal, a powerful feminist voice who vowed to defend women’s rights. She got a few polite votes. The other was the poet Nedai, who told the assembly he would create jobs. He got a few token votes. Later, Nedai said he knew he had no hope of winning but felt that an election with only one candidate didn’t look good. He ran for office only to help build democracy per se: quite a gallant gesture, really.

  To this day, Afghans wonder why the United States was so determined to squeeze the former king, Zahir Shah, out of the picture, even though he was the only credible countrywide symbol of reconciliation. Dr. Shams, a former economics professor at Kabul University, told me that, if only he had been allowed to run, he would have declared full support for the American intervention and then told the assembly that if elected he would hand all power over to the former king, the man the assembly really wanted. Shams figured his promise would bring him a flood of support that would overwhelm the American plan to install Karzai. His scheme sounded cunning, but he was not even allowed into the tent, much less to the podium. The loya jirga moved swiftly to elect Hamid Karzai, legitimizing his rule by the very same process that had elevated Ahmad Shah Baba to the throne—at least to the extent that Afghans considered this assembly a real loya jirga, but many didn’t. The seeds of doubt about America were planted at this first grand council.

  Next, Karzai appointed a commission to draft a new constitution, and they completed their task by December 2003. The government called another loya jirga to ratify this document, which was less stage-managed and therefore a bit more messy. One of the most electrifying moments came when Malalai Joya, a young female delegate from a western border province, stood up and denounced the bearded old men surrounding her as warlords and criminals. She said they should be in a docket on trial for war crimes, not seated in a national assembly, discussing the future of the nation. The old guard shouted her down and called her a harlot.

  Over the next month, every interest group in the country pushed for alterations in the draft constitution, resulting in a final document that is oddly vague in some places, oddly specific in others. It takes the trouble, for example, to declare ex-king Zahir Shah “the nation’s father,” a stipulation soon rendered irrelevant by the old man’s death. This constitution declares many times that Afghanistan is an Islamic republic and bans any law conflicting with the Shari’a, but it also specifies that men and women are free, that women have equal rights, and that these include the right to vote, work, and get a (free) education, all of which echo the issues of Amanullah’s day and tries to finesse them in the same way as he.

  The new constitution sets up a parliament with a lower house elected by the people and an upper house appointed by a president, and it limits the president to two consecutive five-year terms—unless, at the end of his second term, he deems it necessary for the good of the country to stay in power, in which case he can.

  Both parliament and president can initiate laws, but if parliament doesn’t approve of laws issued by the president, he can’t enact them—unless he deems it absolutely necessary for the good of the nation, in which case of course he can.

  When the new constitution was promulgated, I asked some of my Afghan acquaintances in California what they thought of it. Mustafa Popal, a college administrator in Alameda, answered, “If it gives us ten years of peace, I’ll be happy. Ten years is all I ask.” A low bar for a constitution, it seems to me.

  The real issue for Afghanistan, however, was not whether the constitution would provide adequate mechanisms but whether Afghans would accept a constitution at all. Filmmaker Tamara Gould, in her documentary A Hell of a Nation, asks a man on the street what he thinks of the Qanoon-i Assassi (Dari for “constitution” but literally “the Fundamental Law”). The man just shakes his head. “Why do we need a fundamental law?” he grins. “We already have a Fundamental Law. It’s called the Shari’a.” All his buddies hanging around nod and chuckle knowingly at the absurdity of forging a fundamental law for a country that already has one!

  Still, the Bonn process moved forward well enough at first. In the fall of 2004, the country held a remarkably successful presidential election. Before the election, the United Nations organized teams of Afghans to fan out across the country and register voters. The teams included women who could get inside the rural fortresses and tell the folks inside what elections were all about. My cousin Zaheda, who worked with one such team, found tremendous enthusiasm among rural women. “I’m going to have my husband bring me an armload of ballots, as many as he can carry,” one woman told her. “I’m going to spend the whole election day just voting and voting.”

  In the end, more than 12 million Afghans registered to vote, including 750,000 living in the refugee camps in Pakistan. Considering that Afghanistan has a population of 30 million and that 57 percent of them were underage (eighteen or younger), that 12 million probably represents the bulk of eligible voters. And about three-quarters of the registered voters made it to the polls, numbers that may seem inflated in the United States, where fewer than half of voters cast a ballot, even fewer if it rains; but investigations turned up (relatively) few examples of fraud, and anyone who drove around on that election day could see the long lines that formed at voting places, even women in burqas waiting for hours to exercise their right.

  There were eighteen candidates on the final ballot, ranging from the secular Tajik poet Abdul Latif Pedram to the conservative Islamist professor “engineer” Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai. One of the eighteen was physician Masooda Jalal, who opposed Karzai at that first loya jirga. She campaigned on the slogan “This suffering country needs a mother and a doctor, and I am both.”

  Campaigning was limited, because only Hamid Karzai had the resources to send his team to every part of the country. “Taliban remnants” tried to intimidate potential voters, in one hideous case ambushing a bus and killing all on board who had voting cards in their possession. Even so, more than 9 million people cast ballots on election day. It was heroic.

  Most of those voters could not read, so they had no idea who was on the ballot. To alleviate the problem, candidates were allowed to include a graphic or icon next to their picture that conveyed what they stood for. One candidate, for example, wanted voters to know he was a progressive who stood for modern education, so he chose as his icon—a book. Another candidate wanted everyone to know he was a God-fearing conservative who stood foursquare by the Koran and so he chose as his icon—a book.

  In short, many who went to the polls that day didn’t really cast a ballot for a particular candidate. Their vote expressed support for voting itself. Seen in this light, the election was a big success.

  Parliamentary elections held a few months later were more disorderly. More fraud occurred, more violence broke out before, during, and after election day; but in the end a parliament was seated and so, by early 2005, the four-step process mapped out at Bonn had been completed, and even a moderate optimist could believe that Afghanistan was on the verge of takeoff.

  TAKEOFF WAS NOT BY ANY MEANS A DONE DEAL, HOWEVER. THE BONN plan was coming to a country devastated by violence and chaos. In the decades of turmoil, the smartest move for any Afghan had been to trust in guns, distrust neighbors, and cluster under the protection of the nearest strongman of familiar ethnicity. The Bonn project could not succeed so long as the country remained in that state of jangled paranoia. From the moment the first loya jirga ended, a race was on between order and chaos. Peace could come only if order won. Order could come only if most people put away their guns and started hatching long-term plans. Most people, however, don’t patiently pursue long-term goals unless they believe the future will be stable. No use repairing a house if a bomb is going to land on it tomorrow.

  The architects of the new Afghanistan therefore had to restore enough normalcy to make at least a few people believe that the Bonn process was going to work and hence that thos
e who bought in early would be the big winners later. If just a few started trying to establishing credibility as citizens of the new order—by entering schools, acquiring job skills, starting businesses, and so on—the Bonn process would look credible, whereupon others would follow suit, whereupon the Bonn process would start to look inevitable, whereupon waves of people would surge to board the train before it left the station, and society would hit a tipping point toward (the new) order.

  Not everyone wanted peace and order, however, at least not the kind envisioned at Bonn. If Kabul could impose its authority over every district and village, the country as a whole might see more peace and some people in the country might build fine lives; but at every level of local power, there were people who would lose something: the power struggle delineated in Abdu’Rahman’s day was hardly over. Self-appointed rural clerics, tribal chieftains, village maliks raised to power by jirgas—all these would lose the ground they had gained during the chaos. All would see their status sink. And if Western values prevailed down to the level of households, men as a class would lose some of the power they had to lord it over women in their own households. Among the women, uneducated older women who dominated domestic governance would be superseded by younger women comfortable outside the compound, girls who would go to school and who might even contemplate careers in the public realm. Anyone who stood to lose from the Bonn project had a stake in seeing it fail.

  Most importantly, there were rootless men roaming the Afghan landscape who had come of age during the chaos. They may have hailed from lower-status families, but, during the war, nothing mattered except how well a man could fight, so the toughest fighters had come to prominence. And, once Afghans had started fighting one another, it wasn’t just fighting ability that determined pecking order, because lots of men could fight; when two tough guys went head-to-head, the winner was apt to be the one with the fewest scruples and the greatest appetite for brutality.

  The years of war and chaos had thus acted as a filter, sifting out traits such as compassion and refinement and favoring unscrupulous brutes for whom the breakdown of social structures was a boon. The dissolution of families and communities liberated them from the judgments of their culture; the absence of any controlling authority gave them license to operate with impunity. Back when Afghans were still fighting the Soviets, guerilla leaders were called “commanders.” After the Soviets left, many came to be known as warlords. Their prevalence sparked the backlash that led to the rise of the Taliban, but, in the end, the Taliban years only sifted out from among the hardest of hard cases those who could attach the honorific of “mullah” to their name. Afghanistan was now brimming with commander-warlord-mullahs. In a society governed by jihadist ideology, their skills would count mightily. They would be heroes. If the Bonn process succeeded, their very strengths would become liabilities, and they might be redefined as criminals. They had every stake in preventing the new society from taking shape.

  The majority of Afghans were sick of war. Nine million of them said so by going to the polls in 2004. But the architects of the new order faced a harder task than the militant radicals interested in keeping society fragmented, because no single positive accomplishment ignites a prairie fire of belief. It takes an accumulation of good moments. The inauguration of one hospital, the completion of one bridge, the opening of one school, the graduation ceremonies of one class—each adds a drop to the pool of public confidence, but it takes a lot of drops to fill a pool.

  By contrast, the bombing of one hospital, the burning down of one school, the destruction of one bridge, the disruption of one graduation ceremony with a suicide bombing triggers a shock that feeds on itself like a scream in an echo chamber. The real thugs needed to deliver only sporadic blasts of horror, knowing that each one would trigger masses of people to grab for guns, bar their windows, and get ready to shoot on sight. As more people behaved this way, behaving this way would become an ever smarter move, until turmoil reached a tipping point. In the race between chaos and order, everything depended on which side reached a tipping point first.

  Pakistan still had a stake, too, in preventing an autonomous government from coalescing in Kabul. Talibanism seeping into Pakistan had set off insurgencies directed at the government in Islamabad, with tribal rebels from the Swat Valley to Baluchistan organizing their own militant movements in the name of the Shari’a law and ethnic chauvinism. The Pakistani government had everything to gain from redirecting this insurgent energy back toward Kabul and away from Islamabad, which might be accomplished by sending agents in to commit occasional acts of senseless sabotage.

  What’s more, the various mafias that operated along the border—the trucking mafia, the drug mafias, the smuggling mafias, the gun-running mafias (overlapping groups, to be sure)—had become thoroughly intertwined with the Talibanism movement, and they were busy building up their own militias. All these forces had their own reasons to block the rise of a new Afghanistan, and they lined up against the central government, the urban culture of Kabul, the war-weary Afghan majority, the expatriate Afghan technocrats, the international community, and the might and money of the United States.

  29

  Kabul Spring

  AT FIRST, THE BONN PROJECT HAD THE MOMENTUM. IN JANUARY 2002, right after the conference ended, representatives from a host of developed countries met in Tokyo to calculate what it would cost to put Afghanistan right. Dizzying numbers were flung about: $10 billion . . . $15 billion . . . $20 billion....

  In the United States, President Bush spoke of a “Marshall Plan for Afghanistan.” Marshall Plan! Urban Afghans knew about that Truman administration program to help Europe rebuild after World War II. The program spent staggering sums of money, and the spending worked: it revitalized the whole Western European economy. It stemmed the advance of Communism—and incidentally helped enrich America. The success of the Marshall Plan made it seem plausible that America would spend massively to help get Muslim Afghanistan back on its feet: after all, a loyal, prosperous Muslim ally at the heart of central Asia could serve America’s strategic interests incalculably—and certainly help stem the tide of Jihadism.

  By summer, Afghans were buzzing about the Marshall Plan. Everybody was talking about what they were going to do with their share of the money. On the plane from Delhi to Kabul that year, I met a man who said he was going to start a cosmetics factory. Mind you, this was not some Afghan-American suit from Fremont, California, but a shopkeeper who had never been further from his hometown than Delhi. He had a huge black beard and was wearing a traditional knee-length shirt, baggy pants, and a bulky turban. I could easily imagine Reuters using his photo as a stock image for generic stories about the Taliban.

  “A cosmetics factory?” I said.

  “Yes,” he explained. “Now that the Taliban are gone, women are going to be going out, and there will be a huge demand for cosmetics. My cousin is already planning to get rich importing lipstick from Dubai, but I say—why import? We Afghans are perfectly capable of making our own lipstick.”

  In the village from which my family hails, people were talking about using their portion of the Marshall Plan money to dig artesian wells (a common small-scale business scheme before the war). The drought was entering its seventh year, but, if they could only irrigate their fields, they could produce commercial quantities of the coveted Hosseini grapes that sold so handsomely in Kabul. Why, they’d be rolling in money!

  Young Kanishka Nawabi, who had lived in Peshawar during the Taliban years and had worked there for a Swedish-based environmental nonprofit called AREA, Association for Reconstruction and Energy Conservation in Afghanistan, was back in Kabul with a plan to distribute some AREA inventions commercially. One was a portable, water-driven generator that might be marketed to villages not yet hooked up to the grid: virtually every village had, after all, a stream rushing down from the high peaks, or else there wouldn’t have been a village in that spot at all. With his device, a village could use its creek to generate enough
electricity to power at least a communal town center and still use that same water to irrigate fields downstream. It would be huge! The same group had created a solar heater that could double as a TV satellite dish and another device that extracted fuel-grade methane from cow dung. All were surefire best sellers in rural Afghanistan.

  The Tokyo Conference finally decided that the reconstruction of Afghanistan would require $25 billion! Afghan leaders attending the conference didn’t push their luck; they asked for only $10 billion. Unfortunately, donor nations at the conference pledged only $3 billion. Never mind: that was still more money than anyone had dreamed possible only one year earlier, and more might yet be pledged.1

  By midsummer, optimism filled the air of Kabul like the fine silt that filled the constant summer breeze. The exiles were streaming back, all those PhDs and doctors, all those financial experts, administrators, and engineers. There were people like Dr. Sherzai, who came home from Fremont, California, the biggest Afghan community outside Asia, to serve as his country’s deputy foreign minister. From Johns Hopkins University came Professor Ashraf Ghani, an eminent political scientist and economist who had once been short-listed to succeed Kofi Annan as secretary-general of the United Nations. He stepped into the role of finance minister. And there were many others.

  By the end of the year, however, less than half the amount pledged at Tokyo had come in. Still, for a poor country like Afghanistan, even a billion or two was manna. Expatriates returning from the West began to reclaim their properties in Kabul. Most of their houses were rubble, but the land was still good—they could build on it again. Some returning exiles who had studied architecture and city planning helped the government draw up an urban renewal plan that envisioned sewage pipes, streetlights, electrical lines to every home, a municipal water system, and all the other elements of infrastructure so vital to a great metropolis and so difficult to install once a busy city already exists. It was almost a boon, really, that a third to a half of Kabul had been destroyed during the civil war and that none of it had been rebuilt by the Taliban. In fact, planners decided not to even bother hauling away most of the rubble: they would build a new Kabul north of the ruins, on what had previously been farmers’ fields or simply barren desert.