Afghanistan After the War Bodes Ill for Iraq

By Phil Reeves

The details are so compelling. The snowman, for instance, that someone built on a roundabout in the middle of this battered city.

This was clearly meant to represent Osama bin Laden, for his name was written on his midriff. He also had a long scraggy beard made of grass and a Taliban head-dress.

A little joke, a dash of black humor to take the mind off the oppressively cold weather and dismal poverty? Or was it an act of scorn at a defeated oppressor? Or an expression of support? And what about the blizzard of propaganda leaflets flung into the streets from a passing car the other night?

That was the first time the “night letters”—regularly distributed in provincial cities—have appeared in the capital, threatening jihad against the foreign soldiers and their allies. Are these the desperate death throes of defeated Islamist extremists, or a sign that they are rallying anew? And what of the persistent whispers that al-Qaeda and Taliban elements have secretly slipped back into Kabul? These were considered serious enough by the United Nations security analysts for them to issue a kidnapping warning to staff on Thursday.

Now, remember, this is Kabul, a city protected by nearly 5,000 international peacekeepers, and the safest, quietest place in Afghanistan. Yet anxiety is gripping it like winter flu.

These unsettling little tremors, possible signals of a more dangerous faultline, are not all. A more basic issue is in play: a deep concern in Kabul that the international community is losing interest even though the task of repairing the wreckage of war—let alone the even more massive job of nation-building—has just begun.

People remember Tony Blair’s pronouncement that the world “will not walk away from Afghanistan, as it has done so many times before.” But Afghans have also listened with astonishment as Americans portray their country’s experience since the overthrow of the Taliban as a “success.”

Now the United States is priming its laser-guided bombs anew, and the attention of the world’s media has swivelled to the deserts and oil fields of Iraq. Few in Kabul seem convinced by the repeated assurances—from the U.S. government and its military, from the U.N. and Britain—that they will not be forgotten or allowed to lapse back into the bloodshed that prevailed after the occupying Soviet forces were driven out by the CIA-funded and CIA-armed mujahideen in 1989.

There are plenty who dislike the presence of the Americans and their allies sweeping around their pot-holed streets in shiny new four-by-fours or army jeeps. This is a city that still has a deeply conservative strain—despite all the trumpeting about the liberation of women, many of those on the streets still wear burqas—and one whose capacity for trust has been corroded by past international betrayals. But a fear of abandonment—or at least a sharp fall-off in international support—is palpable, and encompasses many international aid agency workers as well as residents. One agency official, a veteran of several previous conflicts, told The Independent: “The Pentagon and the White House have absolutely no policy on Afghanistan.”

You find the anxiety in the squalid little shack where Ilal Mohammed adds a few dollars to his $30 monthly income as a government worker by renting out DVDs of women’s wrestling and vaguely raunchy Hindi movies—unthinkable in the Taliban days. Feeding his five small children is hard and conditions at home are miserable. But, he says, it was worse before.

You find it across the road in the grubby hut where Hazrat Shah, a gnarled 75-year-old Pashtun, is selling firewood—a thriving business in a city routinely plagued by power cuts and freezing weather. He has seen it all—Soviet invasion, civil war, the rise of the Taliban, the arrival of the Americans after 9/11. There is at last a measure of relative stability, he says. But these are “very risky times.”

And it is there in the money changers’ outdoor market, where a local surgeon called Dr. Ali—he was fearful of giving his full name—is investing in a few greenbacks. He spelled the position out better than anyone. “If the Americans attack Iraq and leave here, we will lose everything. We have already been through that once before, and we don’t want it to happen again. The international community is our only hope, the only way that we can stand on our two feet one day.”

That day is still a very long way off. The brave new world promised in the aftermath of the Taliban’s ousting has yet to dawn. The country is not remotely close to becoming a functioning state, with a viable infrastructure and control over its territory. And the U.S.-led war against al-Qaeda is not over, even though the world’s attention has drifted elsewhere.

A year ago, the impromptu church service held this month for a small group of U.S. infantrymen in the mountains of southeastern Afghanistan would have made TV news bulletins worldwide. We would all have seen Capt. Jimmy Nichols, battalion chaplain for 2-504 Parachute Infantry Regiment, lead his soldiers in a gruff rendering of the hymn “Keep on the Firing Line.” Dressed in full combat gear, he launched into a sermon about Samson, turning to the wrathful pages of the Old Testament to fire up his men before they resumed their efforts to kill or capture a small group of armed zealots.

Samson was, the chaplain declared, the “original tough guy, long before Rambo,” whose “super-strength” was a gift from God. “God has given us also gifts. You see, the reason that Samson is such a good story for folks like you and me in the military is that Samson is you—Samson is me.”

On the front line, fundamentalism is used to fight fundamentalism.

But, 15 months after the fall of the Taliban, the American Samson has yet to prevail. According to Col. Roger King, the U.S. military spokesman at the Bagram air base outside Kabul, there are “probably several hundred” Taliban and al-Qaeda forces around Afghanistan and “maybe a larger number” over the border with Pakistan. Some of these forces appear to have forged links with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a militiaman who once pocketed CIA funds to fight the Soviet Union before joining the civil war, earning a reputation for extreme brutality. He is marching under the banner of a self-declared jihad against the Americans and their allies.

As the head of the Hezb-i-Islami party, he is suspected in Kabul of involvement in numerous rocket attacks and a car bomb that killed 30 in September. Last year he narrowly missed being killed by a missile fired by a CIA Predator, an unmanned aircraft.

There are other ominous signs. Some 400 rockets have been fired at American forces in 10 months. They find two or three caches of arms, often 107mm Chinese rockets, each week. “This place is 100 times more dangerous than Iraq,” said one U.S. reserve officer at Bagram, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991. “Here they are liable to toss a grenade under your vehicle at any time.”

A fortnight ago the Taliban issued what is thought to be its first communiqué since being removed from power. It named two senior figures—Mullah Obaeidullah and Mullah Biradar—as commanders in a new campaign to oust the Americans.

And the international effort to help establish a meaningful central government under Hamid Karzai is also incomplete. Many of the building blocks of a viable nation—institutions capable of imposing law and order, health services, power supplies, a road network, communications, education—are often absent.

In the first six months of the Karzai interim administration, two ministers, including the first vice-president, were assassinated. The president came close to being killed in Kandahar last September.

Some international agency workers report that there is outright anger and frustration in the provinces over the slow pace of reconstruction and the lack of security, a sense that the Karzai government has done nothing for them. Ethnic rivalries are crucial: dissatisfaction is said to be particularly strong among Pashtuns, who believe that the interim government is dominated by the light-skinned, sandy-haired and often green-eyed Panjshiris.

The Karzai transitional government has been unable to assert its control over most of the country. Until it does so, the free-and-fair elections required next year by the Bonn Agreement will remain a pipe dream.

The U.N. and Hamid Karzai have tried to persuade the international community to tackle the resulting “security vacuum” by extending Kabul’s peacekeeping force, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to key provincial cities—exporting the relative stability that they have created within the capital.

These efforts failed. The Pentagon has proposed a cheaper option: dispatching reconstruction teams of 80 to 100 dominated by U.S. reservists to provincial centers. But this has met strong opposition from international aid agencies.

In the meantime, Afghanistan is awash with hundreds of thousands of weapons, many supplied by the West after the Soviet invasion. Much of this arsenal, including tanks, is in the hands of rival warlords who are still feuding over control of key trading routes. Though several have taken senior jobs and most have expressed verbal support for the Karzai government, they have yet to relinquish their private armies.

The lack of money has dogged Afghanistan from the start. A year ago, the World Bank estimated $10.2 billion was needed over five years. International pledges were about half that sum. And, according to Care International, an NGO monitoring international aid, the money actually spent per capita last year in Afghanistan was under half that of post-conflict Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. The CIA has spent some of that paying warlords and militias for help in the “war on terror”—strengthening rivals to the central government.

So what does this tell us about the fate of Iraq after the Americans have taken it apart?

It is not hard to find international aid workers who see that the problems of Afghanistan will be repeated in Iraq. “There is a real question over whether the international community is prepared to take on the burden of rebuilding Iraq over the long term,” said Paul O’Brien, advocacy coordinator for Care in Afghanistan.

Another Western observer summed up his views more acidly: “If the Americans think this is success, then outright failure must be pretty horrible to behold.”