by Ali, Tariq
Like Neumann, others who still support the war in Afghanistan, which include the media and mainstream political parties throughout North America and Euroland, argue that more state-building on the style of postwar Japan and Western Europe would stabilize the country. Others argue that the model of imperial rule should follow the British style. Neither argument is tenable. Might Afghanistan have been secured with a limited Marshall Plan–style intervention, as is argued by numerous supporters of the war who blame the White House for not spending enough on social projects? It is, of course, possible that the construction of free schools and hospitals, subsidized homes for the poor, and the rebuilding of the social infrastructure that was destroyed after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 might have stabilized the country. But neither the United States nor their EU allies were seriously interested in such a project. It went against the grain of normal neocolonial policies. The Marshall Plan was a unique response to a severe crisis of confidence in a system that had been wrecked by a ferocious war. It was designed to secure Western Europe in the face of a supposed Communist threat. It was a special operation without precedent before or since: the first time in history that a victorious power (the United States) had helped to revive its economic rivals in order to confront a common enemy whose economic system was at the time perceived as a challenge. Afghanistan was an entirely different situation and was handled as a more traditional colonial operation. Mytmhakers, often themselves British, suggested this be done on the British model of “good” imperialism rather than the crude and brutish variety of the Americans. This distinction was almost certainly lost on the benighted Afghans, who had long understood that while the British could be competent administrators, they were every bit as savage as their cousins across the Atlantic, a point demonstrated repeatedly throughout Africa, the Middle East, and India. Their record in assisting the development of the countries they occupied was equally bleak. In 1947, the year the British left India, 85 percent of India’s economy was rural, and the overwhelming majority of midnight’s children were illiterate. The colonial legacy was summarized crisply by the Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. 2, c. 1757–c. 1970:
Capital formation (around 6 per cent of NDP) was inadequate to bring about rapid improvement in per capita income, which was about one-twentieth of the level then attained in developed countries. The average availability of food was not only deficient in quantity and quality, but, as recurrent famines underscored so painfully, also precarious. Illiteracy was a high 84 per cent and the majority (60 per cent) of children in the 6 to 11 age group did not attend school; mass communicable diseases (malaria, smallpox and cholera) were widespread and, in the absence of a good public health service and sanitation, mortality rates (27 per 1000) were very high. The problems of poverty, ignorance and disease were aggravated by the unequal distribution of resources between groups and regions.
Rory Stewart, who served as a colonial administrator in British-occupied southern Iraq, is angered by the stupidity of the occupiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan and not overimpressed by NGO civil-society imports to antique lands. He writes, for instance:
Foreign policy experts will tell you that poor states lack the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, free media, a transparent civil service . . . employees of major international agencies commonly complain that Afghans or Iraqis or Kenyans “can’t plan” or “can’t implement.”
At its worst, this attitude is racist, bullying and ignorant. But there are less sinister explanations. As a diplomat, I was praised for “realism” if I sent home critical telegrams. Now, working for a nonprofit, I find that donor proposals encourage us to emphasize the negative aspects of local society.... Afghans and Iraqis are often genuinely courageous, charming, generous, inventive and honorable. Their social structures have survived centuries of poverty and foreign mischief and decades of war and oppression, and have enabled them to overcome almost unimaginable trauma. But to acknowledge this seems embarrassingly romantic or even patronizing.
Yet the only chance of rebuilding a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan in the face of insurgency or civil war is to identify, develop and use some of these traditional values.... This may be uncomfortable for the international community. A leader who can restore security, reconcile warring parties and shape the aspirations of a people may resemble an Ataturk more than a U.S. president. This is not a call for dictatorship. True progress must be sustained by the unconstrained wishes of the people. These should include, in Afghanistan, people with strong liberal values as much as conservative rural communities. These various desires must be protected from both the contorted control of an authoritarian state and the muffling effect of foreign aid.*
Stewart’s writings have a touch of imperial romanticism, which might help him outlast many bitter disillusionments. A cool, philosophical frame of mind would immediately grasp that it is not aid alone that muffles but the imperial presence itself. It was always thus.
It is sometimes instructive to study history through the evolution of a city. Take Kabul, for instance, the site of numerous invasions and occupations over three thousand years, a few of them benign. Located in a valley, six thousand feet above sea level, it existed long before Christianity. Historically the city was at the crossroads of adjoining civilizations for countless centuries since it commanded the passes, as numerous conquerors starting with Alexander of Macedonia and followed by Sultan Mahmud, Genghis Khan, Babar, and those with less familiar names spent time here on their way to India. Babar loved this city and made it his capital for several years before marching southward. A passionate agriculturist, the founder of the Mogul dynasty, he supervised the irrigation of large tracts of land, planted orchards, and built gardens with artificial streams that made the summer heat and the dust-laden environment of the city more bearable.
The city was a triumph of medieval Mogul architecture. Ali Mardan Khan, a Mogul governor of the seventeenth century and a renowned architect and engineer specializing in public works, built a char-chala (four-sided) roofed and arcaded bazaar on the model of the markets that once existed, and occasionally still do, in a number of old Muslim cities, including Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Palermo, and Córdoba. It was regarded as unique in the region. Nothing on the same scale was built in Lahore or Delhi. This market was deliberately destroyed in 1842 by the Scottish general George Pollock’s “Army of Retribution” (also remembered as among the worst killers, looters, and marauders ever to arrive in Afghanistan, a contest in which competition remains strong). Defeated in a number of cities and forced to evacuate Kabul, the British punished its citizens by removing the market from the map.
A century and a half later, soon after the withdrawal of the Russians, who had built their soulless, multistoried buildings to house their troops and other personnel outside the old city, the Afghan warlords and competing Islamic factions, now fighting each other, came close to destroying the city altogether. Jade Maiwand, a major shopping street that was cut through the center of the city in the 1970s, was reduced to rubble during the warfare of 1992–96. Ajmal Maiwandi, an Afghan-American architect, describes how Kabul has been transformed by history:
The major destruction of Kabul occurred between 1992 and 1996 after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the fall of Kabul to various warring factions in 1992. Throughout the war, the urban identity of Kabul was transformed continuously from a modern capital, to the military and political headquarters of an invading army, to the besieged seat of power of a puppet regime, to the front-lines of factional conflict resulting in the destruction of two-thirds of its urban mass, to the testing fields of religious fanaticism which erased from the city the final layers of urban life, to the target of an international war on terrorism, to a secure gateway into Afghanistan for the internationally backed peace efforts, and presently, to a symbol of a new phase in international unilateralism.*
What Kabul will look like after NATO has left remains to be seen, but the large shantytown settlements that are springing
up everywhere provide a clue. The city may well become a tourist attraction on the “planet of slums”† world tour.
Meanwhile architecture is far from the most important of the country’s problems at the moment. The U.S. presence today is refracted largely through its military muscle, the air power lovingly referred to as “Big Daddy” by frightened, young U.S. soldiers on unwelcoming terrain, but which is far from paternal when it comes to discriminating between civilians and combatants. The real question is not so much Western arrogance, ugly though it is at the best of times, but what the alternative could be in a society where a Western intervention has unleashed similar opposition as have previous wars and occupations by the British and the Soviet Union. There is no simple solution, but what is clear is that an “international community” that thrives on double standards is seen by the population as part of the problem.‡
Profound difficulties are also to be found among the lucrative blooms in Afghanistan’s luscious poppy fields. The NATO mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a significant reduction in the heroin trade. How could it? Karzai’s own supporters, few in number though they are, would rapidly desert if any attempts were made to stop their trading activities. It would require massive state help to agriculture and cottage industries over many years to reduce the dependence on poppy farming. Ninety percent of the world’s opium production is based in Afghanistan. UN estimates suggest that heroin accounts for 52 percent of the impoverished country’s gross domestic product, and the opium sector of agriculture continues to grow apace. Indeed, these have been persistent allegations—just as persistently denied by their subject—that President Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the richest drug barons in the country. At a meeting with Pakistan’s president in 2006, when Karzai was bleating on about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, General Musharraf calmly suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control. The hatred for each other of these two close allies of Washington is not a secret in this region.
Added to the opium problem are the corruptions of the elite, which grow each month like an untreated tumor. Western funds designed to aid reconstruction were siphoned off to build fancy homes for their native enforcers. As early as 2002, in a gigantic housing scandal, cabinet ministers awarded themselves and favored cronies prime real estate in Kabul. Land prices in the city had reached a high point after the occupation, when the occupiers, NGO employees, and their camp followers built large villas for themselves in full view of the poor.
Then there is, of course, the resistance. The “neo-Taliban” control at least twenty districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces where NATO troops replaced U.S. soldiers. It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. The situation is out of control, as Western intelligence agencies active in the country are fully aware. When the occupation first began, Secretary of State Colin Powell explained that his model was Panama: “The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police, or other means.” His knowledge of Afghanistan was clearly limited. Panama, populated by 3.5 million people, could not have been more different from Afghanistan, which has a population approaching 30 million and is geographically quite distinct. To even attempt a military occupation of the entire country would require a minimum of two hundred thousand troops. A total of eight thousand U.S. troops were dispatched to seal the victory; the four thousand “peacekeepers” sent by other countries rarely left Kabul or stationed themselves in more peaceful regions in the north of the country. The Germans concentrated on creating a police force, and the Italians, without any sense of irony, were busy “training an Afghan judiciary.” The British, more hated by the Afghans than even the Americans, were in Helmand amid the poppy fields. Incapable of crushing the resistance, they tried to buy off the local resistance until this was vetoed by an enraged President Karzai.
Colin Powell’s ignorance also extended to regional and ethnic complexities. During a closed meeting in Islamabad soon after the occupation, he openly failed to grasp the difference between ethnicity and ideology, happily equating Pashtun and Taliban. Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, the Pakistan foreign minister, corrected the misapprehension by pointing out gently that two senior Foreign Office officials present at the meeting were Pashtuns, definitely not Taliban.
And lastly, while economic conditions failed to improve, NATO military strikes often targeted innocent civilians, leading to violent anti-American protests in the Afghan capital in 2006. What was initially viewed by some locals as a necessary police action against Al Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks is now perceived by a growing majority in the entire region as a full-fledged imperial occupation. The neo-Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation. As the British and Russians discovered at a high cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never like being occupied.
The repression, striking blindly, leaves people with no option but to back those trying to resist, especially in a part of the world where the culture of revenge is strong. When a whole community feels threatened, it reinforces solidarity, regardless of the inadequacies of those who are fighting back. Many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of NATO and the behavior of its troops that they will support any opposition. A related problem is the undisciplined nature of the mercenaries deployed to assist the NATO armies. They are not responsible to the military commanders, and even sympathetic observers admit that “their behavior, including alcohol consumption and the patronage of a growing number of brothels in Kabul (both very effectively prohibited to U.S. military personnel), is arousing public anger and resentment.”* To this could be added numerous incidents of rape, unlawful killings of civilians, indiscriminate search-and-arrest missions, and the rough treatment of women by male soldiers. This has created a thirst for dignity that can be assuaged only by genuine independence.
The middle-cadre Taliban who fled across the border in November 2001 had regrouped and started low-level guerrilla activity by the following year, attracting a trickle of new recruits from madrassas and refugee camps in Pakistan. By 2003 the movement was starting to win active support in the mosques—first from village mullahs, in Zabul, Helmand, Ghazni, Paktika, and Kandahar, and then in the towns. From 2004 onward, increasing numbers of young Waziris were radicalized by the attacks by armed U.S. drones and Pakistani military and police incursions in the impoverished tribal areas. By 2006 there were reports of Kabul mullahs who had previously supported Karzai’s allies but were now railing against the foreigners and the government; calls for jihad against the occupation were heard in the northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.
But the largest pool of recruits, according to a well-informed recent estimate, has been “communities antagonized by the local authorities and security forces.” In Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan, Karzai’s cronies—district and provincial governors, security and police chiefs— had enraged local people through harassment and extortion, if not by directing U.S. troops against them. In these circumstances, the Taliban were the only available defense. According to the same report, the Taliban themselves have claimed that families driven into refugee camps by indiscriminate U.S. airpower attacks on the villages have been the major source of recruits. By 2006 the movement was winning the support of traders and businessmen in Kandahar and led a mini “Tet offensive” there that year. One reason suggested for their increasing support in towns is that the neo-Taliban have relaxed their strictures, for males at least—no longer demanding beards or banning music—and improved their propaganda (producing tapes and CDs of popular singers, and DVDs of U.S. and Israeli atrocities in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine).
The reemergence of the Taliban cannot therefore be blamed simply on Islamabad’s failure to police the border or cut “command and control”
links, as is sometimes claimed by Washington. While the ISI played a commanding role in the retreat of 2001, they no longer have the same degree of control over a more diffuse and widespread movement, for which the occupation itself has been the main recruiting sergeant. NATO’s failure cannot therefore be blamed simply on the Pakistani government.
It is a traditional colonial ploy to blame “outsiders” for internal problems: Karzai specializes in this approach. If anything, the destabilization functions in the other direction: the war in Afghanistan has created a critical situation in two Pakistani frontier provinces. The Pashtun majority in Afghanistan has always had close links to its fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan. The present border was an imposition by the British Empire, but it has always remained porous. It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked twenty-five-hundred-kilometer border that separates the two countries. The solution is political, not military, and should be sought in the region, not in Washington or Brussels.
The cold winds of the Hindu Kush have, through the centuries, frozen both native reformer and foreign occupier. To succeed, a real peace process must be organically linked to the geography and ethnic composition of the country. Those who argue that all that is needed is to throw money at the Afghans to buy off the tribal elders, as the British used to do, have little idea of what is really happening on the ground. The resistance is assuming classical proportions. If one compares Elizabeth Rubin’s graphic reports from Afghanistan in the New York Times with coverage from South Vietnam in the same newspaper forty years ago, remarkable similarities are apparent. Rubin, like David Halberstam in Vietnam, is alarmed by the high rate of civilian deaths caused by NATO: “The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half-a-million in all of 2006.” She later describes the war in Kunar province, where Afghan guerrillas maintain an astonishing level of attacks. American troops come under fire outside their own temporary headquarters:
