by Ali, Tariq
The Taliban regime had been a “purer” model of the Wahhabi state in Saudi Arabia. Repressive and cruel, it had nonetheless restored order in a country racked by foreign and civil wars since 1979. According to virtually every source, the rape that had been endemic in the country was ended with the public execution of rapists, though an overruled radical-feminist wing of the Taliban had suggested that castration would be sufficient punishment. Attempts were also being made to reduce the heroin output, with some success. On the economic front, Wahhabi Islam is perfectly at home with the neoliberal dispensation that rules the world. Koranic literalists can find passages in favor of free trade, and the Taliban delegation received full honors when they visited UNOCAL (now part of Chevron) headquarters in Texas. On December 17, 1997, the London Daily Telegraph headlined, “Oil Barons Court Taliban in Texas,” and informed its readers that the bearded visitors were prepared to sign a “£2 billion contract with an American oil company to build a pipeline across the war-torn country” and, then more mysteriously noted, “The Islamic warriors appear to have been persuaded to close the deal, not through delicate negotiation but by old-fashioned Texan hospitality.... Dressed in traditional salwar kameez, Afghan waistcoats and loose, black turbans, the high-ranking delegation was given VIP treatment during the four-day stay.” A deal was a deal regardless of sartorial differences, and the few images recording this event were later immortalized in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The pipeline project was delayed not so much by Taliban doubts, but by rival offers emanating from Russia and supported by Tehran. Despite this, the U.S. oil company was confident of its success, and a final deal was close to being stitched when the planes hit the Twin Towers.
What many Afghans now expected from a successor government was a similar level of order, without the repression and social restrictions, and a freeing of the country’s spirit. What they were instead presented with was a melancholy spectacle that blasted all their hopes.
The problem was not a lack of funds but the Western state-building project itself. By its nature a top-down process, it aims to construct an army constituted not to defend the nation but to impose order on its own people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil administration that will have no control over planning, health, education, etc., all of which will be run by NGOs whose employees will be far better paid than the locals, and answerable not to the population but to their overseas sponsors; and a government whose foreign policy is identical to Washington’s. In September 2006, a German correspondent in Kabul sent a dispatch home in which she explained the reasons for local hostility to the West and why so many Afghans were joining the resistance. The contrast between the wealth displayed by the occupiers, including corporate expense accounts that charged the cost of prostitutes to their firms, and the poverty of most Afghans created resentment and anger. Add to this the weekend partying in Kabul:
Now hordes of Westerners are chauffeured to the ministries of a morning, and picked up in air-conditioned vehicles of an afternoon. The foreigners have brought new customs to the capital as well; jeans are now on sale, although many women still walk the streets in burkas. Every Thursday, before the Afghan weekend starts, UNHAS—the UN air service that transports embassy and aid organization employees around the country—registers a miraculous spike in passengers to Kabul from the provinces: It’s party time! And the revelry behind the façades of the capital’s aging mansions is as riotous as anything to be found in Berlin or New York.
At a French shipping company’s toga bash, men donned fake laurel wreaths, bared their torsos, wrapped themselves in sheets and pranced around like Roman emperors. At the garden party arranged by an international consulting firm, hundreds of foreigners whooped it up until the wee hours, dancing amid a decorative backdrop of camels.*
It is amazing colonial arrogance to fail to notice that an occupied country is no longer sovereign, even if the occupation has been legally sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. How can any government in these conditions be considered legitimate?
The Bonn Conference organized two months after the occupation, from November 27 to December 5, 2001, could not discuss this central issue and instead became bogged down with power-sharing arrangements. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, ignorant of the realities on the ground, pressed for a federal solution on the German model to neutralize separatist attractions, but this was not a problem. The contentious issue was who exercised power and where. To concentrate Western minds, components of the Northern Alliance organized at least three different coup attempts to topple Karzai in 2002–3. They were obstructed by NATO, providing a vivid illustration of both sovereignty and legitimacy to the population at large.
The reality on the ground was clear enough. After the fall of the Taliban government, four major armed groups reemerged as strong regional players. In the gas-rich and more industrialized north, bordering the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, with his capital in Mazar-i-Sharif, the Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum was in charge. Allied first to the Communists, later to the Taliban, and most recently NATO, General Dostum had reportedly demonstrated his latest loyalty by massacring hundreds of Taliban and Arab prisoners.
Not far from Dostum, in the mountainous northeast of the country, a region rich in emeralds, lapis lazuli, and opium, the late Ahmed Shah Massoud built his fighting organization of Tajiks, who regularly ambushed troops on the Salang Highway, which linked Kabul to Tashkent during the Soviet occupation. The most dynamic, if over-praised, guerrilla leader of the anti-Taliban groups, Massoud hailed from Panjshir province. During the anti-Russian war he had become a favorite pinup in Paris, usually portrayed as a rugged romantic, a Muslim, an anticommunist Che Guevara, a man of the people. His membership in the Jamaat-e-Islami, led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, and his own reactionary views on most social issues were barely mentioned. These were tiny defects at a time when Islamic groups were considered staunch allies of the West.
Had Massoud not been killed by a suicide bomber two days before 9/11, he would have been the most obvious candidate to head a post-Taliban government. The French government issued a postage stamp with his portrait, and NATO named Kabul airport after him. But Massoud could never have been as reliable a client as the transplanted Hamid Karzai, and it is an open question whether the indigenous guerrilla leader would have accepted a lengthy foreign occupation or agreed to permanent U.S. military bases in the country. He had been the leader of the armed wing of Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Islamist group, which operated in tandem with an allied Islamist leader, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Both men were lecturers in Sharia, or Islamic law, on the faculty at Kabul University in 1973. Their movements were incubated and, until 1993, funded by Saudi Arabia, after which the latter gradually shifted its support to the Taliban. Massoud maintained a semi-independence during the Taliban period. To his supporters in the West he had presented an image of pure, incorruptible masculinity. It was not the same at home. Rape and the heroin trade were not uncommon in areas under his control. His supporters are currently in the government, but not as reliable as Karzai, which worries NATO.
On the west, sheltered by neighboring Iran, lies the ancient city of Herat, once a center of learning and culture where poets, artists, and scholars flourished. Here, for over three centuries, important books were written and illustrated, including the fifteenth-century classic Miraj-nameh, an early medieval Islamic account of the Prophet’s ascent to heaven from the Dome of the Rock and the punishments he observed as he passed through hell. Some European scholars maintain that a Latin translation of this work inspired Dante. The book has sixty-one paintings in all, created with great love for the Prophet of Islam. He is depicted with Central Asian features and seen flying to heaven on a magical steed, which has a woman’s head. There are also illustrations of a meeting with Gabriel and Adam, a sighting of houris at the gates of paradise, and renderings of wine bibbers being punished in hell. These stunning illustrations are accompanied by the exquisite calligraphy of Malik Baksh
i in the Uighur script.
The sophisticated culture required to produce such a work is a far cry from modern Herat and its outlying regions, where the Shia warlord Ismail Khan today holds sway and where the majority of Hazaras live. A former army captain inspired by the Islamic revolution in neighboring Iran, Ismail achieved instant fame by leading a garrison revolt against the pro-Moscow regime in 1979. Backed by Tehran, he built up a strong force that united all the Shia groups and was to trouble the Russians throughout their stay. Tens of thousands of refugees from this region (where a Persian dialect is the spoken language) were given work, shelter, and training in Iran. From 1989 to 1992, the province was run on authoritarian lines. The harsh regime and Ismail Khan’s half-witted effrontery began to alienate supporters. His high-tax and forced-conscription policies angered peasant families. When the Taliban took power in Kabul, support had already drained away from the warlord. Herat fell without a struggle. Ismail and his supporters quietly crossed the border to Iran, where they bided their time, to return in October 2001 under NATO cover.
Iran has certainly given covert support to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, which removed their enemies from power. This proved more beneficial in Iraq, where pro-Iranian parties were given a large share in the Green Zone government. In Afghanistan the situation was different. Here the Tajiks make up 27 percent of the population; the Uzbeks and Hazaras, 8 and 7 percent respectively; and 54 percent of Afghans are Pashtuns, who live in the south and east of the country along the border with Pakistan. During the first Afghan war (1979–92) three militant Sunni groups acquired dominance, and soon after they took Kabul the tiny non-Muslim minority of Hindus and Sikhs, mainly shopkeepers and traders, were displaced. Some were killed. Ten thousand refugees fled to India. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an ISI asset, was provisioned by Pakistan and had been groomed by the Saudis to take over, but found himself confronted by Massoud and others. The jihad was long over and now the jihadis were at each other’s throats. The brutal power struggle wrecked the country and had little to do with religion. They were, after all, all Muslims. Rather than matters of faith, what was at stake was control of the drug trade.
Meanwhile, serious problems confronted the occupying forces. The brutality of U.S. and British troops alienated the population, and talk of “victory” began to sound hollow to Afghan ears. By 2003–4 existing Taliban guerrilla factions were mounting serious resistance, attacking troop carriers, occasionally bringing down helicopters, and punishing collaborators. NATO retaliation resulted in extensive civilian casualties, leading to further disenchantment with the occupation. With some exceptions this was barely reported in the West. Time magazine became a serial offender (though it was by no means alone) by running unfiltered NATO spin, as typified by Tim McGirk’s report of March 28, 2005, which summons every conceivable cliché to bang the drum for the official case:
“The Taliban is a force in decline,” says Major General Eric Olson, who conducted the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency battle until last month. . . . The Taliban’s fall has been a long time coming . . . what turned the tide? In a word, nation-building. . . . Last October’s Presidential elections were crucial. . . . “It was a moral and psychological defeat for the Taliban,” Olson told Time. . . . Now the Taliban is a busted flush.... Says Major Mike Myers, a spokesman for the U.S. forces in Kandahar, “The Taliban class of 2004 was smaller than the class of 2003.” . . . In Kabul, Karzai is hoping that the Taliban are now demoralized enough to consider an amnesty. Soon, Karzai is expected to announce a “reconciliation” with all Taliban except Omar and his top commanders.
That this was pure propaganda must soon have become obvious to the editors of Time. Less than a year later, on February 26, 2006, an attempted assassination of Dick Cheney by the Taliban occurred while he was visiting the “secure” U.S. air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base). Cheney’s survival provoked some controversy on U.S. television when Real Time host Bill Maher expressed consternation that comments posted that same week on the Huffington Post website had been removed because “they expressed regret that the attack on Dick Cheney failed.” Maher went on to say, “I have zero doubt that if Dick Cheney was not in power, people wouldn’t be dying needlessly tomorrow. . . . I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” No European TV pundit would have dared to make this sort of comment in public. They were too cowed by the “war on terror.”
Two U.S. soldiers and a mercenary (“contractor”) died in the attack on Cheney, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have focused the U.S. vice president’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. The casualty rates rose substantially in 2006 as NATO troops lost forty-six soldiers, shot down in helicopters or caught in clashes with what was now being referred to as the neo-Taliban. In the confrontation with their Afghan antagonists, the United States was facing a number of closely interrelated problems.
The first was the failure of “nation-building.” Few tears were shed in Afghanistan and elsewhere when the Taliban fell, but the hopes aroused by Western demagogy did not last long. It soon became clear that the new transplanted elite would cream off a fair portion of the foreign aid and create its own criminal networks of graft and patronage. Then there were the NGOs. Even those sympathetic to the occupation had lost patience with these organizations. The Karzai government, of course, disliked them because it felt all the aid money should be channeled through the government. But disaffection with these organizations extended throughout the populace. In a state with hardly any stability, the notion of “civil society,” which the NGOs were committed to building, had little appeal. In addition, the resources available to them provoked considerable resentment. “The NGOs,” according to an experienced and well-versed U.S. academic, “brought scores of over-paid young people into their communities, where they flaunted their high salaries and new motor vehicles. Worse, their well-funded activities highlighted the poverty and ineffectiveness of the civil administration and discredited its local representatives in the eyes of the local populace.”* Unsurprisingly, they began to be targeted by the insurgents and had to hire mercenary protection.
There are few signs that the $19 billion in “aid and reconstruction” money devoted to Afghanistan has served to ease the suffering of the majority of its people. The electricity supply is worse now than five years ago. As one commentator noted, “While foreigners and wealthy Afghans power air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite televisions with private generators, average Kabulis suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.”* As a result, hundreds of homeless Afghans are literally freezing to death each winter.
Overall, “nation-building” in Afghanistan has so far produced only a puppet president dependent for his survival on foreign mercenaries, a corrupt and abusive police force, a “nonfunctioning” judiciary, a burgeoning criminal layer, and a deepening social and economic crisis. Even the West’s own specialists and institutions concede much of this to be the case. It beggars belief to argue that more of the same will be the answer to Afghanistan’s problems.
IN SEPTEMBER 2005, a quick-fix election was organized at high cost with the help of U.S. public relations firms. The lion’s share of the profits was pocketed by the Rendon Group of Washington, D.C., which has received contracts worth millions of dollars. The elections were organized, at least partly, for the benefit of Western public opinion, but the realities on the ground soon overcame the temporary feel-good impact. NATO troops guarded polling booths in some areas and the Northern Alliance in others. There were widespread reports of coercion, and residents of Baghlan, Kapisa, and Herat provinces told reporters from the Pajhwok Afghan News agency that some polling agents, staff, and police officials had forced them to cast votes for particular candidates. Karzai had to vote in a special voting booth constructed inside the presidential palace.
The results failed to bolster support for NATO inside the country. While
12 million Afghan citizens were eligible to vote, just over 4 million did so. The violence preceding the elections symbolized the absurdity of the process. Though newly elected, President Karzai symbolized his own isolation, as well as an oft-tested instinct for self-preservation, by refusing to be guarded by a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun base. He wanted and was given tough, Terminator-look-alike U.S. marines. They were later replaced by mercenaries or privatized soldiers.
In September 2006, exactly a year after the elections had been trumpeted as an enormous success in the Western media, an attempted bombing of the U.S. embassy came close to hitting its target. A CIA assessment that same month painted a somber picture, describing Karzai and his regime as hopelessly corrupt and incapable of defending Afghanistan against the Taliban. Ronald E. Neumann, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, supported this view and told the New York Times that the United States faced “stark choices”: a defeat could only be avoided through “multiple billions” over “multiple years.”*
