| Ander Nieuws week 46 / nieuwe oorlog 2006 |
Vancouver Sun
November 8, 2006
By Jonathan Manthorpe
As American voters give the administration of George W. Bush their verdict on his Iraqi escapade, it is also time for Canada and its NATO allies to review the results of their efforts in Afghanistan.
In recent months various agencies and military and civilian administrators have been making assessments of the state of play five years after the United States-led coalition invaded Afghanistan to remove the Taliban rulers and end their support for al-Qaida terrorists.
The assessments do not make pretty reading.
The overall picture is that despite hard and successful recent offensives by NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and especially the Canadians in Kandahar and British in Helmand, the resurgent Taliban is extending its influence and active battlefronts north and west from its ethnic Pashtun heartland in those southern provinces.
There are two main reasons for this. One is dissatisfaction often reaching contempt for the government in Kabul.
The other is growing resentment at the presence of the NATO forces. The North Atlantic alliance troops are seen more and more as an army of occupation rather than the bringers and insurers of peace and stability. Resentment is fed, of course, every time local civilians become accidental victims of NATO attacks.
The hub of the problem is the non-functional government of President Hamid Karzai, whose slender authority stems from his selection by Washington as its man in Kabul, rather than from the October 2004 elections.
These were more an exercise in public relations than a thorough expression of democracy. And like similar elections in Iraq, the Afghan election has only served to accentuate the fault lines in society.
The rush to hold elections before any sound administrative foundations had been constructed and before the culture of courtesy and respect that are essential to the functioning of democracy had been instilled seems foolish in retrospect.
As a result the Karzai administration's governing capacity doesn't go far beyond the city limits of Kabul, and frequently not even that far.
Among ordinary Afghans the Karzai regime is seen as being terminally corrupt and without popular support. In addition, the legislature is viewed as little more than a social club for regional warlords and drug traffickers.
One recent report calculated that among the 249 members of the lower house of the congress there are at least 17 known drug traffickers, 40 regional warlords, 24 members of criminal gangs and 19 men facing allegations of war crimes or human rights abuses.
With such a band of cut-throats running the country it is hardly surprising that the mainstay of the economy is the cultivation and trafficking of the opium poppy and that "liberated" Afghanistan now feeds 92 per cent of the global market in this street drug.
Afghanistan's peasant farmers are usually not willing cogs in the wheels in this trade. Normal agriculture doesn't work because of lack of seed and fertilizer inputs or functional markets for produce.
In these circumstances the drug lords easily bind farmers into a cycle of debt bondage in which they are constantly growing poppies to pay off last year's cash advances.
Last month Lieut.-Gen. David Richards, the British commander of the NATO forces, warned, "We could actually fail here." He gave the NATO forces only six months to bring security and a significant start to reconstruction, especially in the Pashtun south, or there may be an irreversible shift in popular sympathy towards the Taliban.
The U.S. ambassador in Kabul, Ronald Neumann, gave a similar assessment to The New York Times recently. "We're going to have to stay at it," he said. "Or we're going to fail and the country will fall apart again."
Afghans' attitudes towards the Taliban are not clear-cut. For some people with existing ethnic ties or religious sympathies, the Taliban are popular because they are not corrupt and bring social stability.
Others just bow to the will of the gunman at the door be he Taliban or NATO trooper.
But as the Soviets found in their 10-year occupation of Afghanistan, even winning on the battlefield -- which they did more consistently than Western history admits -- is no guarantee of victory in a clash of cultures and ideas.
Sun International Affairs Columnist
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| Ander Nieuws week 46 / nieuwe oorlog 2006 |