The Duel (36 page)

I
N SEPTEMBER 2005
, a quick-fix election was organized at high cost with the help of U.S. public relations firms. The lion’s share of the profits was pocketed by the Rendon Group of Washington, D.C., which has received contracts worth millions of dollars. The elections were organized, at least partly, for the benefit of Western public opinion, but the realities on the ground soon overcame the temporary feel-good impact. NATO troops guarded polling booths in some areas and the Northern Alliance in others. There were widespread reports of coercion, and residents of Baghlan, Kapisa, and Herat provinces told reporters from the Pajhwok Afghan News agency that some polling agents, staff, and police officials had forced them to cast votes for particular candidates. Karzai had to vote in a special voting booth constructed inside the presidential palace.

The results failed to bolster support for NATO inside the country. While 12 million Afghan citizens were eligible to vote, just over 4 million did so. The violence preceding the elections symbolized the absurdity of the process. Though newly elected, President Karzai symbolized his own isolation, as well as an oft-tested instinct for self-preservation, by refusing to be guarded by a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun base. He wanted and was given tough, Terminator-look-alike U.S. marines. They were later replaced by mercenaries or privatized soldiers.

In September 2006, exactly a year after the elections had been
trumpeted as an enormous success in the Western media, an attempted bombing of the U.S. embassy came close to hitting its target. A CIA assessment that same month painted a somber picture, describing Karzai and his regime as hopelessly corrupt and incapable of defending Afghanistan against the Taliban. Ronald E. Neumann, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, supported this view and told the
New York Times
that the United States faced “stark choices”: a defeat could only be avoided through “multiple billions” over “multiple years.”
*

Like Neumann, others who still support the war in Afghanistan, which include the media and mainstream political parties throughout North America and Euroland, argue that more state-building on the style of postwar Japan and Western Europe would stabilize the country. Others argue that the model of imperial rule should follow the British style. Neither argument is tenable. Might Afghanistan have been secured with a limited Marshall Plan–style intervention, as is argued by numerous supporters of the war who blame the White House for not spending enough on social projects? It is, of course, possible that the construction of free schools and hospitals, subsidized homes for the poor, and the rebuilding of the social infrastructure that was destroyed after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 might have stabilized the country. But neither the United States nor their EU allies were seriously interested in such a project. It went against the grain of normal neocolonial policies. The Marshall Plan was a unique response to a severe crisis of confidence in a system that had been wrecked by a ferocious war. It was designed to secure Western Europe in the face of a supposed Communist threat. It was a special operation without precedent before or since: the first time in history that a victorious power (the United States) had helped to revive its economic rivals in order to confront a common enemy whose economic system was at the time perceived as a challenge. Afghanistan was an entirely different situation and was handled as a more traditional colonial operation. Mytmhakers, often themselves British, suggested this be done on the British model of “good” imperialism rather than the crude and brutish variety
of the Americans. This distinction was almost certainly lost on the benighted Afghans, who had long understood that while the British could be competent administrators, they were every bit as savage as their cousins across the Atlantic, a point demonstrated repeatedly throughout Africa, the Middle East, and India. Their record in assisting the development of the countries they occupied was equally bleak. In 1947, the year the British left India, 85 percent of India’s economy was rural, and the overwhelming majority of midnight’s children were illiterate. The colonial legacy was summarized crisply by the
Cambridge Economic History of India,
vol. 2, c. 1757–c. 1970:

Capital formation (around 6 per cent of NDP) was inadequate to bring about rapid improvement in per capita income, which was about one-twentieth of the level then attained in developed countries. The average availability of food was not only deficient in quantity and quality, but, as recurrent famines underscored so painfully, also precarious. Illiteracy was a high 84 per cent and the majority (60 per cent) of children in the 6 to 11 age group did not attend school; mass communicable diseases (malaria, smallpox and cholera) were widespread and, in the absence of a good public health service and sanitation, mortality rates (27 per 1000) were very high. The problems of poverty, ignorance and disease were aggravated by the unequal distribution of resources between groups and regions.

Rory Stewart, who served as a colonial administrator in British-occupied southern Iraq, is angered by the stupidity of the occupiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan and not overimpressed by NGO civil-society imports to antique lands. He writes, for instance:

Foreign policy experts will tell you that poor states lack the rule of law, a vibrant civil society, free media, a transparent civil service . . . employees of major international agencies commonly complain that Afghans or Iraqis or Kenyans “can’t plan” or “can’t implement.”

At its worst, this attitude is racist, bullying and ignorant. But there are less sinister explanations. As a diplomat, I was praised for
“realism” if I sent home critical telegrams. Now, working for a nonprofit, I find that donor proposals encourage us to emphasize the negative aspects of local society.... Afghans and Iraqis are often genuinely courageous, charming, generous, inventive and honorable. Their social structures have survived centuries of poverty and foreign mischief and decades of war and oppression, and have enabled them to overcome almost unimaginable trauma. But to acknowledge this seems embarrassingly romantic or even patronizing.

Yet the only chance of rebuilding a nation like Iraq or Afghanistan in the face of insurgency or civil war is to identify, develop and use some of these traditional values.... This may be uncomfortable for the international community. A leader who can restore security, reconcile warring parties and shape the aspirations of a people may resemble an Ataturk more than a U.S. president. This is not a call for dictatorship. True progress must be sustained by the unconstrained wishes of the people. These should include, in Afghanistan, people with strong liberal values as much as conservative rural communities. These various desires must be protected from both the contorted control of an authoritarian state and the muffling effect of foreign aid.
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Stewart’s writings have a touch of imperial romanticism, which might help him outlast many bitter disillusionments. A cool, philosophical frame of mind would immediately grasp that it is not aid alone that muffles but the imperial presence itself. It was always thus.

It is sometimes instructive to study history through the evolution of a city. Take Kabul, for instance, the site of numerous invasions and occupations over three thousand years, a few of them benign. Located in a valley, six thousand feet above sea level, it existed long before Christianity. Historically the city was at the crossroads of adjoining civilizations for countless centuries since it commanded the passes, as numerous conquerors starting with Alexander of Macedonia and followed by Sultan Mahmud, Genghis Khan, Babar, and those with less
familiar names spent time here on their way to India. Babar loved this city and made it his capital for several years before marching southward. A passionate agriculturist, the founder of the Mogul dynasty, he supervised the irrigation of large tracts of land, planted orchards, and built gardens with artificial streams that made the summer heat and the dust-laden environment of the city more bearable.

The city was a triumph of medieval Mogul architecture. Ali Mardan Khan, a Mogul governor of the seventeenth century and a renowned architect and engineer specializing in public works, built a
char-chala
(four-sided) roofed and arcaded bazaar on the model of the markets that once existed, and occasionally still do, in a number of old Muslim cities, including Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Palermo, and Córdoba. It was regarded as unique in the region. Nothing on the same scale was built in Lahore or Delhi. This market was deliberately destroyed in 1842 by the Scottish general George Pollock’s “Army of Retribution” (also remembered as among the worst killers, looters, and marauders ever to arrive in Afghanistan, a contest in which competition remains strong). Defeated in a number of cities and forced to evacuate Kabul, the British punished its citizens by removing the market from the map.

A century and a half later, soon after the withdrawal of the Russians, who had built their soulless, multistoried buildings to house their troops and other personnel outside the old city, the Afghan warlords and competing Islamic factions, now fighting each other, came close to destroying the city altogether. Jade Maiwand, a major shopping street that was cut through the center of the city in the 1970s, was reduced to rubble during the warfare of 1992–96. Ajmal Maiwandi, an Afghan-American architect, describes how Kabul has been transformed by history:

The major destruction of Kabul occurred between 1992 and 1996 after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the fall of Kabul to various warring factions in 1992. Throughout the war, the urban identity of Kabul was transformed continuously from a modern capital, to the military and political headquarters of an invading army, to the besieged seat of power of a puppet regime, to the front-lines of factional conflict resulting in the destruction of two-thirds of its urban mass, to the testing fields of religious fanaticism which
erased from the city the final layers of urban life, to the target of an international war on terrorism, to a secure gateway into Afghanistan for the internationally backed peace efforts, and presently, to a symbol of a new phase in international unilateralism.
*

What Kabul will look like after NATO has left remains to be seen, but the large shantytown settlements that are springing up everywhere provide a clue. The city may well become a tourist attraction on the “planet of slums”
^†
world tour.

Meanwhile architecture is far from the most important of the country’s problems at the moment. The U.S. presence today is refracted largely through its military muscle, the air power lovingly referred to as “Big Daddy” by frightened, young U.S. soldiers on unwelcoming terrain, but which is far from paternal when it comes to discriminating between civilians and combatants. The real question is not so much Western arrogance, ugly though it is at the best of times, but what the alternative could be in a society where a Western intervention has unleashed similar opposition as have previous wars and occupations by the British and the Soviet Union. There is no simple solution, but what is clear is that an “international community” that thrives on double standards is seen by the population as part of the problem.
^‡

Profound difficulties are also to be found among the lucrative blooms in Afghanistan’s luscious poppy fields. The NATO mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a significant reduction in the heroin trade. How could it? Karzai’s own supporters, few in number though
they are, would rapidly desert if any attempts were made to stop their trading activities. It would require massive state help to agriculture and cottage industries over many years to reduce the dependence on poppy farming. Ninety percent of the world’s opium production is based in Afghanistan. UN estimates suggest that heroin accounts for 52 percent of the impoverished country’s gross domestic product, and the opium sector of agriculture continues to grow apace. Indeed, these have been persistent allegations—just as persistently denied by their subject—that President Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the richest drug barons in the country. At a meeting with Pakistan’s president in 2006, when Karzai was bleating on about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, General Musharraf calmly suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control. The hatred for each other of these two close allies of Washington is not a secret in this region.

Added to the opium problem are the corruptions of the elite, which grow each month like an untreated tumor. Western funds designed to aid reconstruction were siphoned off to build fancy homes for their native enforcers. As early as 2002, in a gigantic housing scandal, cabinet ministers awarded themselves and favored cronies prime real estate in Kabul. Land prices in the city had reached a high point after the occupation, when the occupiers, NGO employees, and their camp followers built large villas for themselves in full view of the poor.

Then there is, of course, the resistance. The “neo-Taliban” control at least twenty districts in Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan provinces where NATO troops replaced U.S. soldiers. It is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. The situation is out of control, as Western intelligence agencies active in the country are fully aware. When the occupation first began, Secretary of State Colin Powell explained that his model was Panama: “The strategy has to be to take charge of the whole country by military force, police, or other means.” His knowledge of Afghanistan was clearly limited. Panama, populated by 3.5 million people, could not have been more different from Afghanistan, which has a population approaching 30 million and is geographically quite distinct. To even attempt a military occupation of the entire country would require a
minimum of two hundred thousand troops. A total of eight thousand U.S. troops were dispatched to seal the victory; the four thousand “peacekeepers” sent by other countries rarely left Kabul or stationed themselves in more peaceful regions in the north of the country. The Germans concentrated on creating a police force, and the Italians, without any sense of irony, were busy “training an Afghan judiciary.” The British, more hated by the Afghans than even the Americans, were in Helmand amid the poppy fields. Incapable of crushing the resistance, they tried to buy off the local resistance until this was vetoed by an enraged President Karzai.