Despite a new constitution that guarantees women's rights in Afghanistan, many judges are barely literate and know only Sharia or Islamic law as recently shown in case of an Afghan Christian who received the death sentence before whiskered of to Italy.Attempts to resurrect the Afghan state during the last five years have been dependent on four sets of players. On the Afghan side there are Karzai and his ministers, the warlords, and struggling human rights workers. The international community has been led by the UN secretary general's special representative to Afghanistan. The first three special representatives —Brahimi, followed by the Frenchman Jean Arnault and the German Tom Koenigs—have helped administer the elections, the parliament, and the government, and they have coordinated their activities with the UN development agencies and some eight hundred Western and Afghan non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as well.
The most influential international officials have been the Americans, led by the US ambassador and the successive American generals who have led the coalition forces, which now number 23,000 troops. (Most of them are Americans who are hunting down members of al-Qaeda.) The most decisive and intrusive foreign official in Afghanistan was Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as US ambassador from 2003 to 2005 and is now the US ambassador in Iraq. Initially, the US government refused help with peacekeeping in Afghanistan. A more recent participant in this activity in Afghanistan is NATO, which, since August 2003, has led the eight-thousand-strong International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, in Kabul. This year NATO will deploy 11,000 more troops as it sets up provincial reconstruction teams in twenty-three of the country's thirty-four provinces. Next year US forces will merge under NATO to create a single command.
It is now five years since George W. Bush declared victory in Afghanistan and said that the terrorists were smashed. Since the Bonn meeting, in late 2001, a smorgasbord of international military and development forces has been increasing in size. How is it, then, that Afghanistan is near collapse once again? To put it briefly, what has gone wrong has been the invasion of Iraq: Washington's refusal to take state-building in Afghanistan seriously and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq. For Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money, and a lack of coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives on the part of Western and Afghan leaders. The Bonn conference created the scaffolding to build the new Afghan structure, but what was consistently missing were the bricks and running water. Inside the scaffolding there is still only the barest shell.
One consequence has been a revived Taliban movement that has made a third of the country ungovernable. Together with al-Qaeda, Taliban leaders are trying to carve out new bases on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. They are aided by Afghanistan's resurgent opium industry, which has contributed to widespread corruption and lawlessness, particularly in the south. The country's huge crop of poppies is processed into opium and refined into heroin for export, now accounting for close to 90 percent of the global market. This spring's crop is expected to be larger than ever, and reports suggest that drug smugglers are increasingly forming alliances with Taliban fighters. According to the Independent in London, Islamic fighters agreed to temporarily suspend their campaign of violence during the poppy harvest this year, to ensure maximum profits. The Afghan government has shown a fatal incapacity to deliver services to its people and the West has failed to deal with interfering neighbors, such as Pakistan and Iran.
The situation was becoming so critical that many concerned donors, but especially the United Nations, debated how to formally continue extending support to Afghanistan after the process agreed on at Bonn was completed. In February 2006, Karzai, the UN, and a large group of nations signed the Afghanistan Compact in London, setting out, once again, the world's commitment to Afghanistan and in turn Kabul's commitment to state-building over the next five years. Praised as a major declaration of the world's solidarity with Afghanistan, the compact is in fact an admission of strategic failure. Many of its goals can be found in numerous promises, agreements, and pledges that were made, and never fulfilled, by the US, Britain, and other powerful nations as far back as 2001. The compact may well be a case of too little too late—even if it could be fully carried out. Rubin observes that the Afghan government will be held accountable for any failure to meet the compact's ambitious goals, but the Western nations that sponsored it cannot be held accountable. We have seen the same pattern in Iraq and Sudan. The international community makes promises that remain unfulfilled, only to remake them a few years later, freshly packaged.
NATO's supreme commander, the American general James Jones, is fond of saying that Afghanistan's main problem is drugs, not the Taliban. However, without taking on the Taliban, the drug problem cannot be addressed. In the four southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and Uruzgan, the Taliban and their mafia friends from Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia command farmers to grow poppies so they can rake in money from taxes and peddle heroin abroad to fund their movement. These provinces are the main base and command center for the Taliban and are now entirely devoid of any signs of economic reconstruction or the presence of NGOs. In fact British, Dutch, and Canadian troops under NATO command will be deployed in these provinces this summer; but they have adamantly refused to address the poppy problem, and each country has a different strategy for contending with the Taliban. The British say they will go on the offensive; the Dutch say they will act defensively. Thus the NATO forces seem more like a coalition of the unwilling than anything else, and the Taliban have started to challenge them with an accelerated summer campaign of bombings and ambushes.
At a conference in Madrid on May 17, General Jones made an impassioned plea to the twenty-six NATO countries who are sending troops to Afghanistan this summer to end the national restrictions that they impose on their own forces. There are now some seventy-one restrictions on how the forces can be used, he said, making it extremely difficult for the commander of ISAF to run an effective military campaign—whether it's winning people's sympathies or fighting the Taliban. Jones told me he was doing his best to get the caveats down to a manageable number.
The day after the conference, as Jones left Madrid, the Taliban attacked in four provinces in southern Afghanistan. Trying to seize a small town in Helmand province, they sponsored two suicide car bomb attacks, ambushed convoys, and planted mines. A total of 105 Afghan civilians, police, and Taliban died—the bloodiest single day since the war ended in December 2001. A Canadian woman soldier and an American contractor were also killed.
The American government has demanded that NATO become more active, because, I was told, the beleaguered Donald Rumsfeld is desperate to bring some American troops home by November's congressional elections. Around three thousand of the 23,000 US troops now deployed in Afghanistan are scheduled to return home this summer and Western intelligence officials say several thousand more may depart before November. The start of an American withdrawal in the midst of a vicious Taliban resurgence naturally infuriates Karzai and his government; it is particularly disillusioning for millions of Afghans who, unlike their Iraqi counterparts, still equate a sizable US military presence with security, continued international funding, and reconstruction. In Iraq practically the entire population wants the Americans to leave, however pleased they are about the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the survival of the new Afghan government has depended upon the leadership of the US and its ability to convince the rest of the world to rebuild the country. The US needs to contribute money to carry out its promises and show it is willing to stay the course. It is doing neither.
Since 2003 when the Taliban first began to regroup, they have gradually matured and developed with the help of al-Qaeda, which has reorganized and retrained them to use more sophisticated tactics in their military operations. As recently as a year ago, the main Taliban groups were composed of a few dozen fighters; now each group includes hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, and horses. They burn down schools and administrative buildings and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government. In the south, they operate with impunity just outside the provincial capitals, which have become like Green Zones. Approximately 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some three hundred already this year. There have been forty suicide bombings during the past nine months, compared to five in the preceding five years. Some 295 US soldiers and four CIA officials have been killed in Afghanistan since September 11, 2001 —140 by hostile action.
The Taliban movement is partially directed from Quetta, in Pakistan's Baluchistan Province, where it has been allowed to flourish largely undisturbed by the military regime of President Pervez Musharraf. The Pakistanis have never started a military operation against the Taliban in Ba-luchistan or arrested a single senior Taliban commander—although several minor officials have been handed over to Kabul. Taliban logistics, training, and recruitment were formerly dependent on allies in Pakistan such as the fundamentalist Islamic parties that rule Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. But the Taliban is now well entrenched in southern Afghanistan too. Al-Qaeda has also put Taliban members in touch with insurgents in Iraq; the result is that the Taliban members are learning how to plan and carry out suicide bombings, make and plant mines, and detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They thus have been able to prepare increasingly deadly ambushes for Afghan and Western troops.
North of Baluchistan, in the Pakistani Pashtun tribal areas of North and South Waziristan and adjacent provinces in Afghanistan, a more international kind of insurgent movement has taken root. It is led by al-Qaeda and Pakistani Taliban, and includes members of the Afghan Taliban, Central Asians loyal to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Chechens, Uighur and Chinese Muslims, and other Afghan groups led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani. They are fighting largely in the east and northeast of Afghanistan, but have also demonstrated an improved capacity to set off car bombs and mount suicide attacks in Kabul and other major cities. They have been able to hold off Pakistani troops who were sent to Pakistan's border areas by Musharraf under considerable US pressure in the spring of 2004. However, Pakistan is not the only problem. Barnett Rubin writes that all of Afghanistan's neighbors—Iran, India, Russia, and the Central Asian Republics—oppose a long-term US presence and have funds for their own Afghan proxies just as they did during the civil war in the 1990s. They are waiting for the Americans to leave.
The lack of security is a direct consequence of the small numbers of Western forces on the ground. Quite apart from the countryside, they have failed to secure even the major cities and highways so that aid agencies can work. For five years the US Pentagon has single-mindedly pursued al-Qaeda while failing (just as it has done in Iraq) to acknowledge the need for a coherent plan to restore civil society in Afghanistan, as well as the importance of hunting down the Taliban, which it has treated as a local, Afghan problem that US troops should not be concerned with. The result has been the absence of a clear US strategy for dealing with Pakistan. This has deeply frustrated the Afghan leadership, while creating periodic shout-ing matches between Karzai and Musharraf on CNN. The effectiveness of the American campaign against al-Qaeda, meanwhile, is itself questionable, since the group's two top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, remain at large. The Americans claim to have caught numer-ous leaders they describe as Number Three in the al-Qaeda hierarchy, although every time a Number Three is caught another seems to take his place.
Second on Rubin's list of Afghanistan's most serious problems is "corrupt and ineffective administration without resources." Once the war in Iraq began, the government received too little money and support to make its ministries capable of delivering services to the people. In this vacuum, warlords and cabinet ministers were quickly won over by bribes from members of the drug trade; they sought out business and property deals for themselves. But the major nations were squabbling over Iraq and paying little attention. Rubin observes that poverty, hunger, ill health, and gender inequality are so bad in Afghanistan that the country remains at the bottom of every global ranking.
In Afghanistan, the drug trade has undermined everything from security to development, while increasing public frustration with the government. Afghanistan produces 87 percent of the world's heroin according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), based in Vienna. UNODC estimates that the value of all opiates produced in Afghanistan last year was $2.8 billion—out of which only $600 million reached the farmers. That is much less than the average estimated $2.5 billion per year that Western donors have provided Afghanistan since 2001. The aid programs supposed to provide alternative livelihoods to farmers producing poppies or help them grow other lucrative cash crops are derisory when compared to what the drug smugglers offer. The best-functioning programs to help farmers are run by opium traffickers who provide improved varieties of poppy seeds, fertilizer, and better methods of cultivation to increase opium yields and even large-scale employment during the poppy harvest. When we compare Afghanistan's situation today with that of 2001, we see the country now needs to develop an entire alternative economy to replace the drug economy.
That international donors refuse to invest in the agricultural regions where 70 percent of the population live has been a critical failure. Another has been the failure to fund infrastructure projects. In the five years since the US-led invasion not a single new dam, power station, or major water system has been built. Only one major intercity highway has been completed. Only one in three Kabul residents has electricity, which works only one out of every three nights. Rubin points out that until 2003 funding for Afghanistan's reconstruction was below that of East Timor and Haiti. Meanwhile, the US and NATO are spending between $15 billion and $18 billion a year on their military operations. Most tragic of all, Western populations are hardly aware of the crisis because there has been chronic failure to report on Afghanistan, especially in the USA since not even CNN as a reporter there.