Banyan
But what do they really want?
A WEEK in Afghanistan impresses two things upon the visitor. The first is that the United States, pouring vast quantities of soldiers and dollars into the country, is at last getting serious about creating the kind of stable nation that caters to the wishes of its people. The second is that few people have much idea what those wishes are.
Though America has been in Afghanistan since 2001, its serious insurgency-busting, nation-building strategy is relatively new. George Bush routed the Taliban after September 11th because al-Qaeda had, like a parasitic brood, commandeered the Taliban state in order to organise and train for global jihad. But once the Taliban and al-Qaeda were on the run, the administration paid mere lip service to building a stable Afghanistan.
It fobbed off peacekeeping on to NATO and created an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) with a remit that at first did not go beyond Kabul, the capital. Nobody troubled about forging a national army. Fixated by terrorism, the Bush administration ignored the risks of rising opium output. Soon insurgencies were multiplying, fuelled by drugs, warlords, local resentments, a weak national army and police and a recovering Taliban. Years were wasted, not to mention lives and money.
Now America and its friends have what is surely a last chance to put things right. If they fail, Western voters will run out of patience, even as more Afghans will become convinced that if the Westerners haven’t put their country on its feet by now, it must be because they have nefarious motives for seeing it prone.
For Stanley McChrystal, the general in charge of ISAF forces, the real fight is only just beginning. He and his commanders have studied the history of counter-insurgencies (won in an average of 13 years, lost in 11). They downplay the chief oddity of this one, which is that foreign forces are fighting it. But at least building a national army is now high on their agenda.
The new strategy is about to face its defining moment in Kandahar. The province matters because it is the cultural centre of the Pushtuns, who are Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic group. Kandahar city is the spiritual home of the Taliban, who set up their capital there in 1996. Today Taliban insurgents again hold sway over much of the Kandahar countryside. Even in the city, which is controlled by the government, a spate of Taliban killings this year has targeted local leaders. ISAF cannot afford to let Kandahar go wrong.
Battle should begin after the leaves have dropped in the vineyards, offering less cover for insurgents. But, the allied commanders insist, the counter-insurgency in Kandahar will be less a military offensive than a process designed to reassure, impress and safeguard civilians. Much of the talk is about how to restore electricity supplies or get a giant television screen up in the city so that locals can watch the World Cup. As for the Taliban-held districts, the idea is to capture them and quickly drop in some hand-picked local leaders. New schools and roads will follow. Government-in-a-box.
Yet Kandahar highlights the limits, even contradictions, of the new approach. In the city people suffer not from political actors who are too weak but rather those who are too powerful. The government and the armed business networks behind it are no less oppressive than the Taliban.
Kandahar’s shadow shogun is Ahmed Wali Karzai, half-brother to President Hamid Karzai. He has grown rich on ISAF patronage. Armed forces linked to him have contracts to protect the CIA and to escort ISAF fuel convoys. In 2009 they killed the city’s chief of police in a shoot-out. ISAF believes the president’s half-brother may profit from the drugs trade, if only indirectly. Distinctions between friend and foe, it seems, are dissolving. For all that it regrets breeding him, the coalition depends on Ahmed Wali Karzai too much to cut him loose.
One Kandahar citizen says he had hoped the protection rackets—so common during the civil war of the early 1990s—were things of the past. That must surely be true for most Afghans. But, even so, it is hard to know what they want instead.
Democracy was supposed to give an answer but President Karzai stole the last election. Possibly folk are readier to attempt a bolder political accommodation with Taliban leaders than he seems prepared to endorse at the “peace jirga” he convened this week in Kabul. It was supposed to find a national consensus on the issue of reconciliation with enemies. But few observers expected much from the gathering, even before the Taliban fired rockets at it.
The problem of knowing what Afghans think is an obstacle more generally. When World Bank workers attempt to take surveys, they have to memorise the questions and answers, since villagers speaking to strange folk with clipboards are at risk from insurgents. The best annual survey of public opinion, by the Asia Foundation, is necessarily self-selecting since surveyors cannot go into dangerous areas. But even it found last year that the proportion of respondents who feared voting in national elections had risen from 45% to 51%. That bodes ill for September’s parliamentary elections.
As for General McChrystal, for all his desire to understand better what Afghans want, he and his advisers have to move around in a security bubble. Last week the general tried to break out of the bubble by striding purposefully from the ISAF garrison in rural Kandahar he was visiting, in search of Afghans to question. The only two adults about, village elders, gave every impression of having been laid on for him. Their praise for the counter-insurgency was gushing. The general didn’t seem to drink it in.
No comments:
Post a Comment