The 9/11 Wars (16 page)

In Jalalabad itself the bazaars were lively, the restaurants full. Saif Shezad, a businessman who had spent eighteen years in Pakistan, said he was ‘very happy’ with how things had turned out. He ran Jalalabad’s biggest music and video shop. All his music, let alone the Indian ‘Bollywood’ movies that were his clients’ favourites, had been banned by the Taliban, and now Shezad sold 200 videos each week. Next door was a pharmacy run by Sikhs. They too were content. Not just because, as one of Afghanistan’s religious minorities, they had faced discrimination under the previous regime but, Gurmut Singh said, because now they could play billiards and computer games at an arcade near by.
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Near the former militant training camp of Darunta, there were rows of new cars waiting to be sold. Every day scores of taxis bounced along the road west, too dangerous to travel without a heavily armed escort just six months previously, weaving among the over-laden lorries ferrying goods to and from the Afghan capital.

Kabul too was transformed with hundreds of new businesses and restaurants now open. There was an internet café and a mobile phone network in a city where a single satellite phone at the general post office once provided the only public international phone connection. There were even traffic jams. A huge fruit market had opened on the city’s outskirts, and a new hotel or guesthouse appeared every week. One or two of the most daring and most liberal-minded women had substituted a headscarf for the
burqa
when they left home.
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It is easy to forget the heady days in Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban’s fall from power, especially given the violence and disillusion that came later. Yet through 2002 the worry among the vast proportion of Afghans, including much of the deeply conservative south and east where the Pashtun ethnic tribes dominated, was not that foreign troops would stay too long in their country but that they might prematurely leave. Many spoke of the country’s collective experience after the Soviet war to justify their anxiety. Polls said that 80 to 90 per cent of Afghans supported the presence of the ISAF troops.
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This may have been an exaggeration, but everywhere one travelled – and for around eighteen months it was possible to travel anywhere without concern for anything other than the appalling state of the roads – one found the expectation that a new era of security, stability and prosperity was dawning. The failure to manage these expectations was arguably the first major non-military strategic error made by the international community.

But few at the time thought expectations even needed to be managed. The soldiers of the newly formed International Security Assistance Force, led to start with by the British and then the Turks, were popular in Kabul and successfully achieved their limited aims of ensuring security in the city and protecting the new government and the thousands of Westerners who had arrived there to assist with the nation’s reconstruction. An emergency
loya jirga
(grand assembly or council) involving 1,501 indirectly elected delegates including 160 women was held, the president inaugurated with a two-year term, a constitution and eventual ‘free, fair and representative’ elections prepared. At Tokyo in January 2002 the international community had pledged $4.5 billion of redevelopment funds which, though about half of what the World Bank said was necessary, was seen at the time as a sufficient sum.

By the end of the year a substantial proportion of the 4.5 million Afghans living as refugees in Pakistan and Iran had returned to their homeland under the auspices of international agencies working through the newly created United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in what was one of the biggest peaceful voluntary transfers of populations in recent history. A significant number of educated and capable Afghans from the US and Europe had returned too. A single and stable currency was created, banks and banking systems were set up, ministries were created, equipped and staffed (albeit fairly rudimentarily compared to the resources available to the new offices of the international organizations or the UN), and a British team collated, compiled and revised the nation’s maps. After President Bush personally resolved a year-long internal stand-off between the American government development agency USAID, who wanted to prioritize rural development, and those in the administration who favoured using the money to hire (foreign) contractors to start road-building projects, work finally began on resurfacing the Kabul–Kandahar highway.
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Tens of thousands of weapons were collected in a rolling programme to disarm militias. Many of the arms were old, and huge stocks remained, but it was a start nonetheless. Corruption, astonishingly, was actually reduced, with Afghanistan improving its rating by Transparency International, the international NGO that monitors the problem.
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Private investment flowed in – from the Gulf, from the Afghan diaspora, from China. A media sector of great energy and very variable quality sprung up almost overnight. Foreign reporters working in Afghanistan split into those who were seeing the country for the first time and were surprised by its poverty and the apparent lack of progress and those who had known Kabul and other cities under the Taliban and for whom the change was dramatic. There was much talk of ‘the international community’.

For the ‘international community’ had certainly arrived in Afghanistan – or in Kabul at least. Journalists filled the coffee-shop-cum-bar at the Mustafa Hotel in Shar-e-Nau, watching DVDs of Russell Crowe in
Gladiator
on a new flat-screen brought over from Dubai, and held impromptu parties on the roof that provoked complaints about late-night noise from the newly refurbished Interior Ministry. NGOs poured in international staff, many coming direct from the Balkans, Africa or Pakistan. Thousands of often young, usually highly educated, largely white Western people arrived. Many were serious, experienced and highly qualified experts in their fields; others were not. There were ex-British army engineers, wide-eyed American college graduates, Italian jurists, Californian water specialists, polylingual veterans of a dozen anti-narcotics campaigns from everywhere between central Asia and Latin America. One new ‘adviser’ cheerfully confessed to having been hired on a Tuesday and arriving in Afghanistan, a country he had never visited before, the following Sunday. Hundreds of brand new luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles jammed the streets – white for the United Nations and the diplomats, black for the private security companies also arriving en masse, khaki for the militaries. Inevitably, an infrastructure sprang up to serve this large and wealthy new population – courier companies, fixers, translators, workmen, drivers, cleaners and bars such as ‘L’Atmosphère’, where steaks, imported bottles of French wine, a swimming pool and the thrill of being in a supposed conflict-zone encouraged a holiday atmosphere. Visiting dignitaries haggled over carpets and ‘genuine’ Gandharan relics made in sweatshops in Pakistan. Rents rose five- or tenfold in desirable parts of the city such as Wazir Akbar Khan, the upmarket northern suburb undamaged during the civil war of the early 1990s. One evening in 2002, as off-duty Italian soldiers, Dutch and French NGO workers, British anti-narcotics experts, American journalists and a gaggle of recently hired consultants to the newly created ministries drank and danced, the author was offered ecstasy by a development specialist who had flown in that day from Frankfurt.

These were not the first representatives of the developed West to arrive in Afghanistan in recent decades, of course. Apart from isolated travellers or academics, the first wave had been the hippies during the 1960s. But these visitors were few and minimal in terms of their social impact. There had also been the limited number of American development experts and contractors who had arrived to oversee the spending of the aid that both superpowers used in a proxy competition for influence in Afghanistan. The Soviet military intervention had seen another kind of foreign presence, of course. In the 1990s, Afghanistan had been a backwater. This latest influx was thus unprecedented.

Quite when the intervention in Afghanistan was expanded from a pure security operation aimed at dismantling Osama bin Laden’s terrorist infrastructure first to a relatively limited nation-building project and finally to an extremely ambitious bid to reconstruct and develop Afghanistan in the image of a liberal, democratic and pluralistic Western state is unclear. Certainly many of the more hard-working and sensible development workers or consultants were as surprised and concerned by it as anyone else. As with so many such phenomena, it was the result of a range of different factors, each unremarkable in itself but together almost irresistible.

One was the background. The intervention in Afghanistan came at the end of a long run of other ‘peace’ or ‘nation-building’ operations in Somalia, the Balkans, East Timor, Sierra Leone and elsewhere. It was thus a culmination of the forward momentum these had generated, in terms of action both on the ground and the new philosophies – moral, legal and political – that informed them. A second factor was the dynamic generated by those arriving in Kabul themselves. Usually Western or Westernized in outlook, they were, whatever their personal politics, representatives of a new and powerful industry of humanitarian assistance and activism that had grown enormously through the 1990s. Though total financial assistance to the developing world had diminished in quantitative terms since the end of the Cold War, with governments ceasing to fund massive politically inspired infrastructural projects such as those seen in Afghanistan or across much of the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s, the numbers of people engaged in the ‘third sector’ of non-governmental aid had increased exponentially. Along with the military and national foreign services they had become a major player deeply engaged in post-conflict environments, a diverse but nonetheless clearly identifiable institution with its own norms, interests, lobbying, capacity and desire for resources, funding, exposure and employment. Finally, there was public consciousness in the West. Since the 1980s, a new awareness among citizens of their ability to ‘aid’ the miserable and suffering, encouraged by a series of international landmark legal agreements such as those banning the use of landmines and reinforced by unprecedented levels of individual activism, had created a new and potent global force recognized and reinforced by politicians and the media. Every new intervention or emergency operation through the 1990s had intensified this new sense of empowerment and zeal. Rebuilding Afghanistan, however, was a very different prospect from a famine-relief operation, separating rival groups in the Balkans or protecting breakaway republics.

One key element that had become rapidly woven into the post-war project for Afghanistan was the issue of women and women’s rights. This continued the dialogue initiated during the autumn when the repression of Afghan women under Taliban rule had been an important part of the political rhetoric of leaders in America and in Europe to the point of almost becoming a
casus belli
in itself. Laura Bush, the president’s wife, had bluntly stated that the ‘fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’, and in the days after the fall of Kabul, Blair, watching television in Downing Street, had pointed to images of women without
burqas
in the streets of the capital as a vindication of the war and how it had been conducted.
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The fact that the
burqa
was worn by Afghan women long before the Taliban came to power and owed as much to the detribalization and urbanization of Afghan society than reactionary rule in itself was ignored.
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The ‘liberation of women’ thus became a key element of the new enlarged project for Afghanistan’s future too.
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Quite what this would entail or how it would be achieved was never fully defined. Bianca Jagger, the human rights campaigner, flew in to Kabul for an International Women’s Day organized by the United Nations and spoke of the ‘passive resistance of Afghan women’ over decades.
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Such an event would have been ‘unthinkable under the oppressive Taliban regime’, said a British Ministry of Defence press release. One difficult and revealing moment came when a young Afghan woman, Vida Samadzai, who had been living in the USA since 1996, controversially took part in the Miss World beauty pageant. Habiba Surabi, the minister for women, told reporters that Samadzai ‘is not representing Afghanistan’s women … and appearing naked before a camera or television to entertain men is not women’s freedom’. When the twenty-three-year-old, the first Afghan in three decades to take part in a beauty contest, confessed her own unease during the beachwear round of the contest and then failed to make the semi-finals, the judges announced that, for the first time, they were giving her a new ‘beauty for a cause’ prize for ‘representing the victory of women’s rights and various social, personal and religious struggles’.
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Such sentiments betrayed at the very least a certain naivety. With the vast bulk of the international community rarely travelling beyond Kabul and certainly having little contact with rural communities, the deep conservatism of much of Afghan society, which the Taliban in part represented, was obscured. Instead, with their interlocutors selected from educated and highly Westernized returning exiles or exceptional women such as the unique (and much-interviewed) former TV news presenter, the vision of the visiting dignitaries who flew in for a short period or of some journalists of Afghanistan as a country ripe for ‘modernization’ and Westernization, the two being increasingly projected as synonymous, went largely unchallenged.
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Even if the core issue remained development, the concentration on the rights of women had the effect of establishing the ‘
burqa
ratio’, as one senior European diplomat in Kabul cynically put it, as a key metric for success in Afghanistan with domestic public opinion in the West. History, however, argued that any effort to radically change Afghanistan needed very careful thought. Change was not impossible, but if any measure came to be seen as alien or imposed efforts could badly backfire. As early as the late nineteenth century, bids to change by force the customary relations of rural Afghan communities had provoked violent revolts. Efforts by King Amanullah during the 1920s to follow the example of Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and force Western-style modernity on reactionary rural populations had provoked a rebellion that eventually led to his deposition. Along with the imposition of secular curricula in schools, the primacy of state law and the reduction of the autonomy of the clergy, it was the issue of female education that had been a particular flashpoint. The same issues led to revolts in the late 1950s and, particularly when allied to land reform, to the protacted and extensive violence in the 1970s which had seen men like Abdul Haq take up arms and had so weakened the Marxist regime of the 1970s that Moscow had felt obliged to intervene.
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