Impressions of Afghanistan
Aug 31 2010, 11:00 PM ET 9
William R. Polk - William R. Polk served as an advisor to President
John F. Kennedy and later became a professor of history at the
University of Chicago, where he established the Center for Eastern
Studies.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/08/impressions-of-afghanistan/62236/
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN—One of the advantages of being an "old hand" in the
Middle East or Central Asia is that almost anything one does conjures
up memories that make for interesting contrasts. My first visit to
Afghanistan back in 1962 began by car, driving up the Khyber Pass from
Pakistan. I was accompanying Governor Chester Bowles, then "the
President's Representative for Europe, Asia and Latin America," that
is, the holder of a title but with no real authority. As befit his
title, we had an American military airplane but, as governed by the
reality of his lack of power, it had broken down. So we drove. I liked
that better since I had pored over Kipling as a boy, and the Khyber
was, of course, where the wild tribesmen hung out.
They still do. We didn't then see any of them, but read the signs of
the passing of the British and Indian regiments carved into the rocks.
It was a wonderful way to reach Kabul. And it was a portent of the
future.
In those days, Kabul was a rather sleepy little city of about 50,000,
roughly the size of the Fort Worth, Texas, into which I was born. Fort
Worth was cleaner but Kabul was far more interesting. And it had the
most marvelous rug stores. It was also the jumping off place for my
2,000 mile trip around the country by Jeep, horseback and the
occasional plane. I fell in love with Afghanistan from the first. To
me it is "the wild East."
My second visit was a decade later. Kabul had hardly changed but the
regime had. Afghanistan was in a sort of golden age of reform.
Everyone was full of hope. The markets were full of furs, rugs and the
melons Babur Shah thought worth more than all of India, Hippies, then
known as "world travelers," flooded into the country equipped with
their parents' credit cards to the delight of local merchants. But
what was really impressive was the university. Filled with earnest
young men and bright, alert and daringly dressed young women, it had
an air of excitement.
Today's entry into Kabul is not less exciting but is stunningly
different. The "advised" way to go these days is by air from Dubai.
The take-off point is Dubai airport which is a huge shopping mall,
almost entirely manned by Filipino expatriates, with attached airlines
from every part of the world. So large is the terminal that I was
taken from the lounge of the feeder airline, Safi, to the gate by one
of those little electric carts that are now standard airport
transport. Even the speedy cart took a quarter of an hour to make the
trip.
Settling back in my seat on the Safi plane, a modern Airbus with
pilots of dubious background (one moved over from, as he put, "Libya,
you know Qaddafi") I flipped through the airline magazine. There,
instead of the usual ads for perfume and watches, were advertisements
for fully armored cars:
You are moving in a dangerous region, you find yourself in the wrong
place at the wrong time, within a matter of seconds; your vehicle has
become a target. Not a problem if you have to have an armored vehicle
from GSG…GSG's armoring provides you with valuable time, enough for
you to grasp the situation, assess the threat and be able to react
appropriately. German Support Group.com
If this did not make you want to rush to Afghanistan, the airline
magazine also provided enticing pictures of shattered buildings.
My reading complete, I was ready for Kabul's "International Airport."
It was even more spartan than the airport I knew in the 1970s, but
this time, as we moved toward the terminal, we paraded past dozens of
planes of other airlines. To judge by the tarmac, it was bustling.
What was particularly striking was that Kabul is the "hub" of a United
Nations virtual airline of helicopters and jets. And, although the
Americans run a far larger airport at Bagram, their planes and
particularly their jets, overflow into Kabul. Nothing like that was to
be seen in my earlier trips.
When we got into the terminal, I found the Afghans to be still the
same polite and welcoming people I had known in previous trips. Then
signs began to appear of the ugliness of civil war. I would see many
such signs in the days ahead, but a hint came in the first minutes. I
was met outside the customs by an American embassy expediter. He had
been expecting me, he said. We shook hands; then he sat down. Or
rather squatted since there were no chairs. Why were we not walking
out to the car? I waited for him to speak, but he just motioned me to
sit. Slightly annoyed, I asked what we were waiting for. He replied
that he had seven other arriving Americans to escort into Kabul. They
were just a trickle in the daily flood. Indeed, it appeared that half
Kabul was made up of new American arrivals. However, the expediter,
seeking to assuage my impatience, rather proudly said that I had been
honored with a special car. Then why, I asked, could I not just get in
and go. "Ah," he said, "it is not that easy." It turned out that not
even embassy cars were allowed to within about two hundred yards of
the terminal, so everyone had to walk from the exit to the guarded car
park. And, naturally, as "nature" is defined these days in Kabul, one
could not do that without an escort.
First lesson: nothing in Afghanistan is easy.
Before I got to Kabul, I had received an email from the escort officer
assigned to me, saying that since Kabul is a "high danger" area, the
embassy wanted me to rent from a private security company known as
"Afghan Logistics" an armored Toyota "4 Runner" and hire both an armed
security guard and a bullet proof vest at 20,000 Afs (roughly $450)
daily. I was to be reassured that the rates included the driver's
salary, fuel and taxes. No bullets were stipulated. I guess they were
extra. However, the daily rate was only for 8 hours and overtime was
at double rate, Kabul being presumably more dangerous at night. But my
embassy escort officer said, these arrangements were both necessary
and standard procedure, and with them I would thus be reasonably well
protected.
I declined. My doing so was not a sign of bravery but a calculation
that such a display would mark me as a worthwhile target.
Flashing through my mind were memories of experiences in other "high
danger" areas. I had arrived in Algiers in 1962 shortly before the
return of President-designate Ahmad Ben Bella (and met him at the
airport with our ambassador-designate). During that confused and
nearly frantic week, when the French had more or less completely
pulled out and the "external" army of the Provisional Algerian
Government had not yet taken over, the "internal" or wilayah
guerrillas were not only settling scores with the French and the
Algerians who had collaborated with them, but also with one another.
The wilayah underground fighters were impressive fellows; they had
fought an army 30 times their size and had worn it down, but almost
none of them could read. So documents were more objects of suspicion
than passes. A smile and a handshake were better than passports. But
many people, particularly those associated with the Organisation Armée
Secrète, had little experience in smiling and if their hands shook it
was because they were carrying heavy weapons. Not surprisingly, CIA
sources indicated that in those few days some 16,000 people were
"disappeared." Yet, I felt safe walking around the city. Two years
later in Saigon, I watched a fire-fight one night from the Embassy
roof, standing next to former Vice President and then Ambassador Henry
Cabot Lodge. Everyone even then knew that the Viet Minh "owned the
night." But, during the day, I felt no hesitation in walking about the
city.
Kabul today provides a very different experience from those. First of
all, signs of danger are all about. Thousands of armed private
security guards from many nationalities as well as Afghans are
scattered throughout the city on virtually every block. Cars are
checked at intersections by Kalashnikov-wielding Afghan policemen or
men who I assumed to be police although some I saw were not in
anything resembling a uniform. Never mind the "bad guys," gun toting
policemen, many said to be high on drugs and virtually all untrained,
were enough of a menace.
Most Kabulis feel that menace, since Kabul is said to be now under the
control of President Karzai's police, and the police are rough with
civilians and often shake them down. But the 140,000 American and
American-led troops and the scores of thousands of mercenaries and
private security guards pay no attention to the police. Nor, as I was
to find, do various privileged Afghans. Anyone who counts has his own
private army. So, taken as a whole, the 50,000 or so "security" forces
constitute a new virtual nation – or actually nations, plural -- as
they come from everywhere, Gurkhas from Nepal, Malays, Samoans,
various Latinos and Europeans with a mixture of what looked like a
delegation from an American weight-lifting club -- alongside of
Afghanistan's already complex mix of nations. (The Pashtuns, Tajiks,
Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Aimaqs, Kirghiz, Nuris, Baluchis and others;
no one group is the majority of Afghans. They tend to be grouped in
discrete areas, but there is much mixing, particularly here in the
capital, but throughout the country. This would make any notion of the
division of Afghanistan along ethnic lines either impossible or would
cause horrible suffering.)
President Karzai would like to rid Afghanistan of the "private
security forces," whom he accuses of fostering corruption and
committing human rights violations. He announced as I began my tale on
August 17 that he will abolish these private armies within four
months, withdrawing their visas, expelling them and closing down the
50 or more firms that hire them, but he probably cannot. They are
"embedded" with our military and with all the diplomatic missions and
the Afghan power elite.
Without any sense of irony, diplomats and generals admit that they do
so actually to protect their own officials and even their soldiers.
Our ambassador, to cite one example, travels with a guard of
mercenaries rather than one of Marines who, in my days in government,
were charged with guarding the embassies. British Deputy Ambassador
Tom Dodd told me, with what I thought was a flash of pride, that the
British had a ratio of 1 mercenary for each Englishman whereas the
American ratio was 3 to 1. The numbers are so large, I asked him to
account for them. "Money," he replied. "They are cheaper than regular
soldiers."
I find that hard to believe. It must be a toss-up. Each soldier costs
us $1 million a year, but foreign (as distinct from Afghan)
mercenaries earn $1,000 or more day just in salaries, not counting
housing and food, transportation several times a year back and forth
to their homes and, perhaps most significant, life insurance.
So much for the foreigners, so why do Afghans hire bodyguards? Partly
prestige, no doubt, but also because of a genuine fear of private
vendetta or assassination by one or other of the scores or even
hundreds of warlords. These men cannot, or at least do not, trust the
regular police to protect them. Having a dozen or so gunmen is also
the road to riches. And, most believe, it is the best way to stay
alive to enjoy those riches.
But it isn't just the rich and powerful whose condottierri lord it
over the ordinary Afghans: assorted other gunmen, including unemployed
young men and even off-duty policemen, routinely shake down
passers-by, shop keepers and even households. Scruffy fellows they may
be, but loaded down with Kalashnikov machineguns, grenades and
pistols, and cavalier about reading government documents, they pose an
implicit threat to almost everyone. The "on-duty" police can do
nothing about them because no one can tell who they are or who stands
behind them – ministers, heads of government departments, bigger
warlords or the Taliban.
Let me dilate on that. We think of the Taliban as a coherent unit. No
doubt it is partly that. But it is diversified in command structure
because of the weakness of their embattled communication system. So
whatever the "center," which is presumed to be far away in Quetta,
Pakistan, decides may not be known in a timely fashion, if at all, by
more or less isolated cadres. Moreover, the organization has many,
perhaps not always wanted, part-time volunteers. Although they may
operate in the name of the Taliban. Many of these people are not
auxiliaries but opportunists. Because of an insult or the presence of
a target, groups of young thugs often carry out assaults or
kidnappings on their own. Such events are different from the
well-planned attacks (like the one on this hotel a few years ago)
involving suicide bombers and commando units. The aim of the
independents is not political; it is either revenge or money, or both.
This makes their danger unpredictable.
Unpredictable it is but it is more or less ever-present. It comes not
only from these casual thugs, the Taliban or even other major
insurgent groups. Indeed, almost anyone with enough money or willing
kinsmen can set himself up as a "power broker." A Washington Post
reporter earlier this month wrote about what must be a fairly typical
minor strongman whom she described as "an illiterate, hashish-
producing former warlord who directs a semiofficial police force…he is
also a key partner of US forces." He has 40 "soldiers" and rules only
about 4 square miles. So you have all the elements: drugs, protection
money, command over a small piece of the supply route – and alliance
with US forces.
Groups like this are all over the country and in the aggregate the
payoff to them is huge. An American Congressional investigation
entitled "Warlord, Inc., Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S.
Supply Chain in Afghanistan," published in June this year, showed that
to implement a $2.16 billion transport contract the US military is
paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public
officials and (indirectly) the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its
supply convoys throughout the country." Dexter Filkins of The New York
Times (who incidentally won a George Polk Award) put it bluntly, "With
U.S. Aid, Warlord Builds an Afghan Empire." He described "an
illiterate former highway patrol commander [who] has grown stronger
than the government of Oruzgan Province, not only supplanting its role
in providing security but usurping its other functions, his rivals
say, like appointing public employees and doling out government
largess. His fighters run missions with American Special Forces
officers, and when Afghan officials have confronted him he has either
rebuffed them or had them removed." How did he do it? Money. Filkins
points out that his company charges $1,200 for each NATO cargo truck
to which it gives safe passage and so makes about $2.5 million a
month. How does he get away with it? As Filkins wrote, "His militia
has been adopted by American Special Forces officers to gather
intelligence and fight insurgents."
Afghanistan today is somewhat like medieval Italy, a land of warlords.
The big ones are just the more impressive of hundreds if not thousands
of small bosses, some with only a dozen "guns," who operate in a
single neighborhood or along a short stretch of road. While many are
involved in the drug trade, others draw their funds from offering
protection or engaging in casual kidnapping. They are known to work
with or at least around the police or even, themselves, may be
part-time members of the police force and/or private security details.
I imagine that every Afghan knows who's who in his neighborhood, but
an outsider can easily blunder into a messy situation. Canny
outsiders, like the members of the resident press corps, as Dexter
Filkins later told me, feel relatively safe because they know where
not to go.
In two ways, this is a very old system in the Middle East. In the
cities, merchants kept a sort of peace because they wanted people to
visit their shops, but Nineteenth century European and native
travelers in outlying areas often "rented" free passage from local
lords. Payment for passage is common – and very profitable, as the
Congressional study made clear -- today in Afghanistan. Trucks moving
fuel or supplies, even for the American Army, almost anywhere in the
country do so by paying off the local strongmen. The American command
is criticized for this practice, but it is notable that even when they
supposedly ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban engaged in the same
practice. What is new is that this system has spread to the cities.
Even restaurants are fenced in with huge concrete walls and steel
gates and "rent" protection.
I went Thursday evening to a little Lebanese restaurant called "The
Taverna" for dinner with Dexter Filkins. I found it to be packed with
people. The owner happened to be from the Lebanese Shuf mountains. On
a silly impulse, I asked him if he were a Junbalti or a Yazbaki. He
looked astonished and asked how I knew of such things. When I replied
that I had written a book on his land, he sent over dish after dish,
"on the house." Nevertheless, the meal was fairly expensive. The
reason was obvious: four armed men, in fact moonlighting policemen,
were guarding the entrance. They are the new thing – not bouncers but
"doorstops."
The biggest doorstop of all, of course, is the American embassy.
Embassy is hardly the right word. It is a vast urban fortress, a city
in its own right. Indeed, it is now the largest in the world with
roughly 1,000 civilians and is flanked by a military garrison that is
far larger and a comparable but unmentioned CIA complex. The American
"city" has its own water purification and electrical system, roads,
dormitories, offices, shops, coffee houses and an "eating facility."
(It would be libelous to call it a restaurant). Virtually every piece
of the American bureaucracy – representatives of more than 60 agencies
-- is in residence. And by residence I mean working, eating, sleeping,
exercising, and being entertained. I spoke to several people who had
left the grounds only a few times in their one- or two-year tours of
duty. They are not allowed to walk anywhere in Kabul (or elsewhere)
but must go only in armored cars, wearing a full suit of body armor
and helmet. The Embassy compound is less than a mile from the airport,
but to get there is to run an obstacle course through a man-made
valley of high, concrete blast walls. Every few yards is a steel
telegraph poll to be raised, a group of security guards to be
satisfied, a guard dog to sniff the car's contents, a mine detector to
be run under it. Then, as each barrier is passed, the driver zigzags,
like a giant slalom skier, around massive concrete blocks to the next
check point. I counted half a dozen. At each check point the
identification procedure starts all over again to satisfy a new group
of sober-faced, heavily-armed mercenaries. I particularly noted that
in addition to their weapons, each man carried in his flak jacket at
least a dozen extra clips of bullets – ready, no doubt for a prolonged
siege. Overhead, a sausage-shaped balloon equipped with sensors keeps
watch on the entire city and helicopters circle frequently. Armored
cars and machinegun nests are discretely scattered about. No wonder
the Afghans believe they are under occupation and that the Americans
intend to stay. Not your typical happy neighborhood.
I had been invited to spend my first night as a guest of Ambassador
Lt. General (rtd.) Karl Eikenberry and his charming wife, Ching. I
will come back to them in a few moments, but I want first to continue
with the physical aspect of life in Kabul.
Since Senator John Kerry had swooped in, unannounced until the last
minute, I had to move over to a hotel on the morning of my second day
in town. Getting there was not easy, but (obviously to clear the way
for the Senator – my threat to become Republican did not save my bed)
the embassy "speeded" me on my way in an armored car with an
American-employed Afghan guide.
Mr. A (who requested that his name be withheld) is a graduate student
of law in Kabul University who works for the US AID mission, As we
drove toward the hotel along the nearly empty Kabul River, he pointed
out the window at the swirling, densely packed, but surprisingly
polite mass of people, many obviously poor but to my eye with no
beggars among them, and said, "this is our problem…"
My first thought was that he meant that they or we were in peril from
the chaotic torrent of trucks and cars. That seemed a good guess since
many showed the scars of previous encounters. Then I thought he might
have meant that we could be caught in a riot, like an Embassy car,
driven by contractors from the mercenary firm DynCorps, was last
month, killed four people. In that instance the latent anger of the
Afghans boiled over with a crowd shouting "death to the Americans." We
might be lynched if we ran over one of the pedestrians. That also
seemed highly likely. It was obvious that anger was there, just under
the surface and that it could easily be set off.
The explosive mixture as at hand: Neither pedestrians nor cars paid
any noticeable attention to one another. No give was offered at any
point by anyone, but somehow each driver knew when he was defeated
just before a collision would have happened. The men and
often-burque-ed women pedestrians performed as though in a Spanish
bullfight. The "bulls" tore along, dashing around or between one
another when they could, diving into temporary gaps, passing on both
sides without any notion of on-coming traffic or of the presumed lanes
into which the road might be divided, while the pedestrians, like
toreadors, nimbly dodged in and out (of if old, blind or one-legged as
a number I saw were, entrusted themselves to God's mercy).
Accidents were surprisingly few; I saw only two in a quarter of an
hour. Sitting often in jams when traffic congealed with both streams
head to head with one another, it struck me that if the Taliban
attacked, they would have no chance to get away. Traffic may be
Kabul's most effective security force.
But I was missing Mr. A's point. He was giving me my first lesson in
Afghan politics. It wasn't traffic regulation but the rule of law that
he was thinking about. He went on: "…we have laws, very good laws, but
no means of enforcing them. These people," he gestured toward the
closed and locked window, "don't even know that we have a constitution
and certainly don't know what their rights are, while the rich and
powerful, who do know that we have a constitution and laws, don't pay
any attention to them. They just do what they want and take whatever
they like. And there is no one to stop them."
I asked if this was also true in Taliban-controlled areas. Without the
slightest hesitation, he said, "no. It is not. There is no corruption
where the Taliban are in control."
When we arrived outside the Serena hotel (which incidentally is owned
by the Aga Khan), we were stopped by the first group of armed guards
outside its battlements. They were more tightly spaced but even more
impressive than those at the embassy. Blankly before us was a wall
made of a 30 foot-high steel gate. As we were identified by a group of
guards, the gate was slid back on its rollers. Slowly we drove in.
There we were stopped by a steel poll and faced a second high steel
gate.
Then the outer gate was rolled shut. There was just enough space
between them for a large car. Locked securely from behind, the car was
checked with a mine detector for bombs. Then the pole was raised and
the second steel gate was opened. We were in, or at least the embassy
armored car was in. Then the steel panel at the rear of the car was
opened to reveal my suitcases which, in turn, were passed through a
detection system. My little camera was particularly worrying to the
security guard, but finally he shrugged and let it (and me) through.
Then to the "front desk" to register. Despite the view through the
glass window of the dozen or so guards, laden with their weapons,
milling around the driveway and five others more or less discretely,
but with bulging double-vented suit coats, standing around the hall,
everything began to seem just like a normal hotel. Except, as I
scanned the parking lot, I could see that the gates were fixed to even
higher concrete walls. They were, I guessed, 40 to 50 feet high. I
would later have a chance to see that the whole hotel and its charming
Persian-style garden, an area of perhaps ten acres, was surrounded by
a similar wall of which most was capped with additional barriers or
razor wire. The Serena Hotel, whatever else it may be, is a castle.
Mr. A accompanied me to my room. I thought this showed a somewhat
excessive concern for my security since we were surely as safe as
walls and gates and guards could make us, but his move turned out to
have another meaning -- as so much in Afghanistan these days seems to
have. This is Ramadan, the month of fasting, and Mr. A could not eat
or drink in public so he asked, rather sheepishly, if I would be so
kind as to order him a sandwich and a Coca-Cola in the privacy of my
room. I was glad I did because this gave us a chance to talk rather
more freely than in the embassy car which, I presume he thought was
bugged. He told me that while the Shiis, of which sect he belonged,
also keep the fast of Ramadan, he did not. He did not explain but from
other experiences I gather this was in part his way of saying that he
was a modern, educated man.
As we waited for the sandwich, he told me a bit about his life. He
could not, he said, admit that he worked for the Americans. And
certainly not for the Embassy. So he told his family that he worked
for a private construction firm. He was afraid to visit his native
province, in the Tajik area, because even a Tajik relative might
denounce him to the Taliban for collaboration with the Americans.
However, he said, since his wife was from the same area, he sometimes
had to return, but he dreaded each visit.
I asked about his roots. His father, he said, had been a doctor who
was chased out during the Russian occupation; so Mr. A grew up a
refugee camp in Peshawar like hundreds of thousands of other Afghans.
When the Russians pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989, his family moved
back and settled in Kabul. Since Kabul has grown from a city of about
50,000 in 1980 to 5 million today, his is a common experience.
I shamelessly used our wait for the sandwich and coke to pursue our
talk in the car about the rule of law. What about property? I asked.
"There is no security in property," he said. "If a person owns, for
example, a house, and the local strongman wants it, he just tells the
owner to get out. The owner has no choice. If he does not obey, he is
apt to be beaten or killed. There is no recourse through government
even if the owner has all the proper papers." But much "private"
property, he explained, is not registered. It is either what people
took over during the civil wars or is owned by custom, perhaps
generation after generation. Under the circumstances of lawlessness,
however, the distinction between registered and unregistered property
is meaningless since neither can be upheld by any authority.
This is true, he continued, even of government property. If the
"intruder" is powerful enough, that is well enough connected to one or
other of the inner circle, he can simply take over government lands or
buildings. Then even government officials can do nothing to make him
vacate. In fact, he may be a minister himself, a member of the "inner
circle." .
The inner circle includes but is not limited to the Hazara Vice
President, Karim Khalili; Kabir Mohabat, an Afghan with American
citizenship; "Marshal" and now Vice President Muhammad Qasim Fahim, a
Tajik; and "Marshal" Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord who
disdains any government post but is the President's "right hand."
(Dostum deserves an Olympic gold medal for opportunism. A leader of
the Uzbek people of the North, he fought the Russians, then joined
them to fight the insurgents; then he joined the insurgency to fight
the Russians; next he joined the Taliban; then he switched sides again
to join the anti-Taliban "Northern Alliance" and is infamous for
suffocating in steel lift vans in the sweltering summer captured
Taliban soldiers. Now – for how long? – he is a supporter of President
Karzai.) It also includes Zara Ahmad Mobil who ran what is regarded as
the most corrupt organization in Afghanistan, the Ministry of
Interior, and (as an editorial in The Guardian put it) "is now in
charge of the opium industry;" and, of course, the Karzai family.
In their meeting with Senator John Kerry, the American press corps
bluntly described the regime as Afghanistan's native mafia. Dostum
deserves an Olympic gold medal for opportunism. A leader of the Uzbek
people of the North, he fought the Russians, then joined them to fight
the insurgents; then he joined the insurgency to fight the Russians;
next he joined the Taliban; then he switched sides again to join the
anti-Taliban "Northern Alliance" and is infamous for suffocating in
steel lift vans in the sweltering summer captured Taliban soldiers.
Now – for how long? – he is a supporter of President Karzai.
President Karzai was himself described, in two dispatches in November
2009 from our Ambassador to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (which
were leaked to The New York Times and published in January 2010), with
great diplomatic caution, as "not an adequate strategic partner."
After being dressed down by President Obama for doubting Karzai's
integrity or rather not being willing to overlook it in order to get
on with the war and to get along with General McChrystal, Ambassador
Eikenberry, now is even more cautious. At least in public. As I will
later point out, in our late night chat on the embassy terrace, he was
more realistic. But, he the points out that Karzai is all we have as
an alternative to the Taliban. In short we are in a position not
unlike the one we faced in Vietnam.
As a general, Eikenberry was a previous commander of the then smaller
American force in Afghanistan. Prior to that he was the military
attaché in the American embassy in Beijing, under my friend Ambassador
Chas Freeman. Eikenberry's charming wife, Ching, is from China's far
northeast and so is of partly Mongol background.
A scholarly, intelligent, hard-driving and honest man, Eikenberry
tries to be optimistic; that goes with the job. He has to be
optimistic no matter what he feels to keep up the spirits of his
staff, but in his confidential dispatches of last November, he wrote,
"The proposed troop increase [the "surge"] will bring vastly increased
costs and an indefinite, large-scale U.S. military role in
Afghanistan, generating the need for yet more civilians. An increased
U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan
dependency…and it will deepen the military involvement in a mission
that most agree cannot be won solely by military means…Perhaps the
charts we have all seen showing the U.S. presence rising and then
dropping off in coming year in a bell curve will prove accurate. It is
more likely, however, that these forecasts are imprecise and
optimistic."
Here I do not want to go into detail on our private talk on the
Embassy roof, which lasted until midnight, because I am writing a
paper for him, based on my study and my talks here, on what I think we
must now do. Let me just say that I do not believe he has changed his
November assessment. Indeed, both he and all the knowledgeable people
with whom I have talked believe the situation is far more dire now
than last year. It is not just the statistics on casualties and
wounded, although they show an accelerating downward trend and the
wounded, in particular, are much more numerous than is reported and
their wounds are both more grievous and much more expensive to
compensate for. (A person with a head injury will cost the Treasury
over his lifetime about $5 million in medical bills. Such costs are
not figured into the figures given out by the Defense Department on
the cost of the war.) But, it is clear that we do not have a coherent
or long-term strategy and are trying to make up for that deficiency by
throwing money – and people – into the fray more or less without any
way of judging whether they help achieve or prevent us from achieving
our vague objectives. Meanwhile, the Afghans appear to be sick and
tired of Americans.
So back to my first informant, Mr. A. When I asked him about the local
feeling toward the Americans he was so guarded that I did not press my
question. All he felt he could say was that there are too many and
their constant presence and display of power are galling. But
Ambassador Eikenberry, he said, was personally very popular. Why? I
pressed. "He goes everywhere without a big escort, and the Afghans
like that," was his reply. Eikenberry later told me that he tried to
appear often even in the supposedly unsafe market area with only a
couple of bodyguards whom he kept as unobtrusive as possible. I don't
know whether the Afghans admired his bravery or were just happy that
he was not flaunting his power. But, whatever the reason, I was to
hear repeatedly that he is indeed popular.
In my day with him, I was astonished by his performance. It was the
very embodiment of the Washington adage: "the urgent drives out the
important." Managing his vast staff, including four subordinate
ambassadors (talk about bureaucratic inflation – I have never heard of
an American embassy with more than one ambassador!), over 60 US
agencies (over many of which he is not in ultimate command) and a
thousand people, meeting daily with General Petraeus and his senior
officers, holding frequent conferences with the Afghan press and
influential Afghans, giving sometimes several speeches a day,
escorting and briefing visiting VIPs like Senator John Kerry, meeting
with, listening to and admonishing President Karzai, and touring the
ubiquitous trouble spots and even, while I was there, walking the
four-mile perimeter of the embassy walls to personally check out the
security arrangement, he is run ragged. I sat in on the briefing of
his "country team." There he was the coach, trying to build morale;
the teacher, urging the men and women from agencies not under his
control to get "out into the field" and to show more sensitivity to
the Afghans; and the diplomat, complimenting each person by name for
some act he had heard about. It was a remarkable performance. Then he
rushed off to meet Kerry, flew with him to a remote post, assembled
the American press corps for a briefing, and in the evening held a
dinner for the entire Afghan television station owners and reporters
at which he gave another speech. As I chided him, he never has time to
sit back and think about what all our frantic activities are really
all about. He must have been alarmed to hear Senator John Kerry say in
an interview here in Kabul on August 19, "We have to remember that
this is the beginning, just the beginning…"
From reflecting on our, the American, problems, I went to pay a call
on Dr. Sima Samar. She is the head of the Afghanistan Independent
Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) and a highly articulate, intelligent
and well informed person. She also must be physically and morally
brave because the environment in which she operates is incredibly
difficult and she has not real power.
As I was getting used to doing, I arrived at her office gate which,
like so much of Kabul today, is massive and steel. A peep hole, like
one might see on the cell door of violent prisoners in a jail, was
pushed open several inches so I and my embassy guide could be
scrutinized. Several minutes passed. Then a section of the massive
gate was swung open to let the two of us inside. Once we were
identified, the full gate was swung back to enable our embassy car,
also identified, with suitable painted messages and a sort of inside
license plate in place of a sun visor, to be driven in. Then the gate
was rolled shut.
As in most of the other buildings, heavily armed – Kalashnikov
automatic rifles, hand grenades, pistols, flak jackets, helmets,
radios, etc. – guards eyed us balefully. They were Afghans. Then an
unarmed civilian appeared, half bowed, shook hands and said hoda
hafez. Turning, he led me, but not my Afghan companion Mr. A, up a
narrow flight of stairs onto a non-descript and rather threadbare
landing. It was in stunning contrast to the massive "security"
outside. My first thought was 'all this protection for so little!'
Then Dr. Samar emerged, seized my hand and led me into her crowded
office. She is an impressive woman, bright eyed, with a ready smile,
of (I guess) 60 years. She had somehow read about me so our
preliminaries were very brief, just the mention of mutual friends,
particularly the grand lady of Afghanistan, my friend Nancy Dupree,
who had particularly urged me to see her. Then without the usual offer
of tea (since it is Ramadan), we got down to business.
The situation here, she said, is really neither black nor white. In
some ways it is better than it was a few years ago, but the real
opportunity was missed in 2002 when the Taliban had been defeated. Had
a relatively small American force been left here then, an acceptable
level of security could have been created and maintained. Today, she
went on -- as I found in most of my talks, everyone began on an
optimistic note and soon this faded into a somber mood -- today, the
real casualty is hope. People today do not believe that an acceptable
level of security can be achieved. The fundamental problem, she said,
is the warlords. They are so deep into the drug trade, are making so
much money, and are so tied into the government at the very top that
there is little hope for any sort of reform. Putting in more troops
will not accomplish anything.
But, then, to my surprise, she went on to say that the Afghan army and
police force are really improving. They need time. Will they get it?
She asked me. I said that I doubted that, despite US government
statements, the American commitment was open-ended. Indeed, America
itself is so beset by financial problems that the mood is shifting.
She nodded and sighed.
Then our conversation virtually began anew. From warlords and
improvement of the security forces, she shifted to what obviously is
the bottom line: the issue of corruption. Can the regime survive? Many
people here -- but not she, she matter-of- factually said – have dual
nationality. They send their children abroad, a son in England,
another or a daughter in the US or Canada, etc. – and perhaps their
wives as well. They also send along with them or at least to foreign
banks as much money as they can. The reason why they do is simple,
they have little trust in the existing government and less in the
future. Why not? She asked. They have nothing to fall back on. What
they are doing is personally prudent even if it is nationally
disastrous.
As I listened, my mind went back to Vietnam. Afghanistan is in so many
ways Vietnam redux. Everyone is preparing his bolt hole and wants to
be sure that it is well padded with money. Afghan Minister of Finance
Umar Zakhilwal admitted that during the last three years over $4
billion – billion -- in cash had been flown out of Afghanistan in
suitcases and footlockers (like I thought only Mexican drug dealers
used) destined for private accounts or persons abroad. While money in
those amounts has a serious effect on the faltering Afghan economy,
what is even more important is that it shows that commitment to this
regime and to Afghanistan is fragile and declining among the inner
circle, Afghanistan's power elite. Back to Dr. Samar. What else, could
she put her finger on? I asked.
"Foreign corruption," she said. "Oh, of course, it is not the same
kind. But when a contract is awarded to a foreign company and it then
either does a bad job or does not finish its work and yet exports 80%
or 90% of the contract funds, is that not also corruption? We would
understand even 50% but few take that little. Is that not corruption
too? But you Americans pay little attention to it; yet it serves as a
model for our people.
"Even when corruption is not involved," she continued, "there are two
tendencies that undercut the benefit your actions might have brought.
The first is the use of machines. Of course, I know," she went on,
"machines are faster and may even do a more beautiful job, but they
displace labor. And unemployment is one of our most serious problems.
It would be far better to use shovels and give people jobs.
"Also bad is the tendency of your contractors to draw on labor from
outside the place where a project is undertaken. Of course,
contractors draw on the cheapest source of labor. So they might use
Tajiks to do a project in a Hazara area, for example. Then the local
people have no sense that it is theirs. We see this often. But, if a
road, for example, is built in a village by local people, they feel it
is somehow theirs and will take care of it. But Americans show no
sensitivity to Afghans and their way of living."
Nothing was to be gained, she said, by adding more troops. There are
already probably far too many. Each new soldier gives rise to a new
Talib. And troops do not address the core issue.
But, she was not in favor of a total withdrawal at this time. Time ,
she said, must be given to enable the police force, at least, to
improve. That, she agreed, was not much solace but it was the best
that could realistically be offered from here.
I next went to see the Deputy Special Representative of the UN
Secretary General, the former German Ambassador to Iraq, Martin
Kobler. His immediate superior, Steaffan de Mistura, a friend of my
good friend and neighbor, Samir Basta, who was his boss had told me
that he is an excellent man and here, I found he is said to be one of
the best informed men in town Unfortunately, he was away on leave, so
Ambassador Kobler filled in.
Ambassador Kobler's headquarters, UNAMA, was understandably under
massive protection. No UN person could forget the killing of the UN
team in Baghdad, including my dear friend, Nadia Younes, who had just
been appointed Assistant Secretary General for the UN General
Assembly. How and why this tragedy happened is a story I will tell at
another time, but here it is memorialized in concrete, steel and a
small army of guards.
Ambassador Kobler launched into our talk by emphasizing how the UN
people moved out around Afghanistan. He did not say it, but almost
everyone else I spoke to did: the Americans stay huddled in their
compounds. Even when they are in "the field," they don't get out and
around very much. It is mainly to move its workers around that the UN
maintains the "airline" I saw when I landed in Kabul. Kobler himself,
he said, tries to make at least one trip a week, often two, outside of
Kabul to one or more of the 40 some odd project headquarters the UN
maintains.
As most of the officials I met were to do, Kobler started rather
sanguine about the current situation, but slowly retreated into major
worry about how to reconcile the two and contradictory objects of the
essentially American policy -- the thrust to build up a central
authority (which, as he said, violates the national genius of the
Afghans) while working with the manifestations of local autonomy
(which is the Afghan tradition). The Americans, he commented, are
trying to swim against the tide of Afghan history by their emphasis on
central authority. Afghanistan always had a weak central authority
that allowed the provinces much freedom of action.
But the Americans are even carrying out their own policy
ineffectively, he said. About 80% of all aid funds flow outside the
control of the central government so effectively the American program
(as in Vietnam) substitutes itself for the central government and so
in the eyes of the public diminishes it. Later I was to hear from the
director of our AID program, Earl Gast, that actually 92% of aid money
bypassed the central government. It was now down to 80% and his,
Gast's, objective was to reduce it to 25%. It is cleaner that way, of
course, but it shows Afghans that they do not have a government other
than us.
Kobler continued: since the American military has virtually all the
disposable money, and the Afghans regard America as intending to
dominate the country into the future, they regard all foreign aid
efforts as a tactic of the war -- as General Petraeus is endlessly
quoted as saying, "money is my main ammunition." These thoughts led us
into the issue of our Afghan traditions versus ours. To work here in
any capacity, he said, we must be sensitive to Afghan traditions,
which we often are not. Every time our soldiers bang on a door, or
break it down, and enter a house to search for an insurgent, going
into the women's quarters and even checking on, or otherwise
manhandling, the women and children and opening up their private
closets etc., which they feel they must do as an insurgent who might
kill an American the next day, may be hiding there, the soldiers (or
more likely the Special Forces) inevitably lose that family to the
Taliban or at least make them hate the Americans.
But, at the same time, he went on, we must stand up for the values we
hold. We do and must absolutely oppose such awful acts as stoning to
death people who violate Sharia laws. There can be no give on this
issue.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of information Kobler gave me was
on the Taliban reaction to last week's UN Report on Taliban killing or
injuring Afghan civilians. Although the Taliban denounced the report,
and the UN for making it, their press release contained what Kobler
thought was a major new development: they called for the creation of
an international tribunal including the Taliban to investigate the
charge. Kobler rightly saw this as a ploy to give the Taliban a sort
of recognition as a quasi governmental "player," but admitted that it
may have lifted the veil slightly on a form of cooperation. He said,
of course, the Americans and the UN would not agree.
I objected, wondering if there were not a way to use this demarche.
Perhaps we should remember, I said, a precedent of the Algerian war. I
laughed and said that of course no one remembered any precedents from
previous wars. He (and later others including the Russian ambassador )
agreed. Everyone said that at the start of each new year we throw away
all our memories of the actions and reactions of the past year and
start all over again.
But what did I have in mind? He asked.
It was not a complete analogy but some adaptation from the Algerian
war might be useful to consider. Toward the end of the Algerian war of
independence, America had a crippling diplomatic problem: .we were
closely allied to France which was fighting the Algerians, but we were
emotionally on the Algerian side and thought that, in any case, they
would prevail. The State Department was torn apart: the European
Bureau wanted to have nothing to do with the Algerians while the
African Bureau was keen to recognize them. President Kennedy hit on a
typical Kennedy solution: use the family. He sent Jackie Kennedy's
half brother, Hugh Auchincloss, up to New York to hang out at the UN.
He had no official title, but he was to be there as a friendly
presence. Identified as he was with JFK, his job was to make
representatives of the Provisional Algerian Government, which had
observer status at the UN, feel welcome. I wondered if some sort of
adaptation might open up contacts with the Insurgents. Was there no
way that at least the beginnings of foundations for future bridges
might be laid? He said he doubted it.
From each of my forays, I found it a relief to return to the hotel.
Again, tradition. Inside the forbidding walls was a delightful
"Persian" garden, where two fountains playing into water channels
which were flanked by beds of roses. I felt back in "my" Middle East.
Alas, the one of fading memory. Then, I had dinner in the hotel
courtyard, listening to traditional Afghan music. Suddenly came the
distant call to prayer. The drummers were silenced, but the moment the
call ended, they took up their drums, not concerned about prayer time
but only about the announcement of prayer. The Taliban would have been
outraged. And, as the Russian ambassador later told me, the ambassador
from the United Arab Emirates certainly was: the accent in Arabic was
terrible and the several calls to prayer across the city paid no
attention to timing. In the UAE, he said, they pushed a button and the
whole country heard one call!
At noon the next day, I drove over to the British embassy to see
Deputy Ambassador Tom Dodd. To say the least, this is an unusual
British embassy. It is the UK's largest, although dwarfed by the
American establishment. It echoed the Americans in its elaborate
security but, to me more striking, was the abrasion of Foreign Office
formality. The email I received from one of the clerks setting up the
appointment was addressed, "Dear William," and saying that "Tom" would
be happy to see me. I thought how the British ambassador I had known
of old would be turning in their graves.
Mr. Dodd – Tom – is a new arrival, and not, I inferred from his rather
vague remarks about his background, a regular Foreign Office man. He
was indeed a civil servant but of what kind I could not tell. He was
more optimistic than most of those I met. He said that while the
situation in Kandahar was the worst, some of the other cities, such as
Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat and Kunduz, were better. What distinguished
them? I asked. He said it was simply that the local warlords were more
willing to share their loot with their followers. So there was a sort
of "trickle down effect," but in Kandahar the President's half-brother
was stingy. I laughed to think how the phrase "trickle down," coined
by my former colleagues, the Chicago economists, was applied to
Afghanistan "security."
Not noticing my reaction, he said that if the programs of his
government, the US and the Afghans have five years, the situation in
Kandahar would be better. Not much gain for five years in that word
"better," I replied. Moreover, I thought a more realistic time frame
was 6 months to a year. And I pointed out how a number of the very
people who fervently advocated the war, like Richard Haass, the
current president of the Council on Foreign Relations, have now turned
against it. As he wrote in Newsweek two weeks ago, "We can't win and
it isn't worth it." I didn't feel that this registered.
When he got on to the military aspects, Dodd said he did not interface
with Petraeus, but he went on to say one positive and one negative
thing: the positive thing is that apparently there are many fewer
Special Forces night raids, although, he said, he is not privy to
them. (That too rather surprised me. As the UK's acting senior
representative, I should have thought he needed to be privy to
everything that affected the UK's position.) The negative thing is
that the policy of killing off the Taliban old guard (he pointed out
that here "old" means 50) is bringing forward younger and more violent
men who have none of the experience or subtlety of the older
generation. This cannot be good, he said. I would later hear much the
same from a former senior Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef,
although he would tell me that much of the old guard is till alive and
in command.
One interesting aspect of the government of Karzai, Dodd said, is that
he can pick up a mobile phone and call almost anyone in the country
and connect within half an hour, and, he said, "the Afghans love to
talk." So presumably Karzai is in contact almost continuously with
people all over the country.
Despite the fall in public support in the UK for the British position
here, he said, Britain has a more important stake than America since
it has about 1 million Pakistani and 3 million Indian
residents/subjects in the UK. But, he said, with I thought something
like wry amusement, in the event of any sort of settlement, interim or
otherwise, "Britain has no money for projects of any magnitude. When
it leaves, as it inevitably must, it will be able to maintain its
special forces and a training mission for the army or police. Nothing
more." When we got onto the cost of the war, to my surprise, he
misspoke or was totally misinformed: he said that the American war
effort here was, after all, "cheap." I must have looked astonished
because he went on to clarify his remark: it was only $7 billion a
year. That is even less than the published figure – perhaps half the
real cost – not for a year but for a month.
Speaking of money leads me to my meeting the next day, Wednesday,
August 18, with US AID Mission Director Earl W. Gast, America's senior
man on the Afghan economy.
Gast was refreshingly candid. Also relatively new to his job, he was
proud of what he was doing. His favorite program, he said, was the
"Afghanistan's National Solidarity Program," which is described as
"the largest development program in Afghanistan and a flagship program
of the Afghan government." It was begun in 2003 and claims to have
financed over 50,000 projects in all of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. In
the words of its MIT-led evaluation, the program "is structured around
two major village-level interventions: (1) the creation of a
gender-balanced Community Development Council (CDC) through a
secret-ballot, universal suffrage election; and (2) the disbursement
of grants, up to a village maximum of $60,000, to support the
implementation of projects selected, designed, and managed by the CDC
in consultation with the village community. NSP thus seeks to both
improve the access of rural villagers to critical services and to
create a structure for village governance on democratic process and
the participation of women."
Nation building in high gear! But as a jaded old hand in reading
government handouts, I asked Gast if it really made any difference. By
way of a reply he gave me the report of a study group sponsored by MIT
under contract to AID. The contractors did a random survey in 250
areas and gave a mixed report. Their report was, indeed, the opposite
of what I would have expected: they found a strong impact on selected
aspects of village "governance" but none on economic activity. Reading
closely both what they said and what they did not say, however, I
doubted that the program had much impact on anything except on our
feeling that we were doing something.
Doing something, Gast said, was his major problem. He is under intense
pressure from Washington to show actions of almost any sort. Before he
arrived, he said, one of the big efforts at doing something was down
in the newly conquered province of Marja. The US military had run the
Taliban out -- or so they thought -- and General McChrystal was
bringing in a "government in a box." Perhaps the most important piece
"in the box" was to be the creation of jobs. So AID set up a program
to hire 10,000 workers – virtually all the adults in a local
population of about 35,000 people – but only about 1,000 took up the
offer. Why? The answer was simple: the local people knew more about
guerrilla warfare than the American army did. From years of
experience, they knew that the guerrillas had done what guerrillas are
supposed to do, fade away when confronted with overwhelming force and
come back when the time is right. They are back. And, as other
insurgents have done in all the insurgencies I studied in my Violent
Politics, they have punished those they regarded as traitors. The
9,000 Afghans who turned down the AID offer were what we would call
"street smart."
Did we learn anything from this experience? To get another opinion, I
met with Dexter Filkins, an "old" – that is not in my terms but at
least a decade old -- Middle East hand, who has spent years in
repeated assignments here, in Iraq, India and Pakistan and who is one
of the few who really gets about the country, on his own, not
"embedded," and not loaded down with flak jacket, body guards and
minders. He is just young enough and daring enough to see a different
picture, I thought. I was right.
First, he said, the Kandahar operation is already in full swing. It
isn't just the assassination squads of the "Special Ops" (aka Special
Forces) but large-scale regular army action although the Military
here, known as ISAF, are not talking about it. And it is essentially,
as I wrote in June on "changing the guard but not the drill," the same
as the Marja operation, just bigger. The failed Marja campaign is the
template for the Kandahar campaign. And it too will fail, Filkins
predicted. Filkins said that Petraeus was essentially trying to apply
what he did in Iraq to Afghanistan without much thought that the two
countries are very different. I disagreed, as I have in print:
Petraeus is replaying not only what the Americans did in Vietnam but
even the French in Vietnam.
But to my surprise, Filkins was relatively complimentary about the
military high command and particularly about Petraeus. What he found
most favorable was that, unlike all the civilians holed up in the
embassy fortress, the military get out into "the field." Had
Ambassador Eikenberry heard this, he would have agreed.
Much of his admonition to the members of his Country Team meeting was
to get out and see.
But, is this really such a good idea? I wonder. Almost everyone with
whom I spoke mentioned how disturbing it was to the Afghans to see so
many Americans. True, there are large areas of the country with no
American military or civilian presence, but from Kabul west, south and
east, Americans are thick on the ground. Would adding more be
beneficial? And particularly adding more when decked out in helmets,
flak jackets and goggles – like my escort officer, a nice American
woman – had to wear even up in the supposedly "secure" northern city
of Mazar-i-Sharif. Not speaking any of the local languages, almost
entirely new to the country (very few have little preparation before
they come, stay here longer than a year and have little contact or,
apparently, interest while they are here) and prone to tell the locals
how to manage their lives, they conjure the phrase common among even
our close friends and allies, the English during World War II, about
the Americans, "over sexed, over paid and over here."
To get a non-American and "historical" view on foreign intervention in
Afghanistan, I arranged to have a dinner and long talk with Russian
Ambassador Andrey Avetisyan. Since we had not met before, I asked him
to tell me about himself. He is a Pashto language specialist who has
served in the Russian Foreign Office, in Belgium and for three stints
here including once during the Soviet occupation. I met him courtesy
of my old friend Evgeny Maksimovich Primakov, the former Russian
Foreign Minister, Director of the KBG and Prime Minister.
Avetisyan and I covered much the same ground as I did my previous
talks with, obviously, different angels of vision. I will report only
the differences here.
Avetisyan was quite categorical in saying that there was no hope of
winning the war militarily. Then he went into a bit of the history of
the Soviet campaign. Two things he particularly singled out were ones
that, he thought, the Russians did rather better than the Americans.
First, they separated economic and military actions. Their "civic
action" projects, unknown to most outsiders, actually accomplished a
great deal. We discussed my favorite, the vast plantations of olives
and the production of oil (both casualties of the civil wars in the
1990s) from which the memory lingers to this day. He is often
approached, he said, by Afghans, even former anti-Russian fighters,
who compare the Russians favorably to the Americans.
The second aspect of the Russian economic program he thought was
better was that they did not provide cash to the Afghans. Of course,
he said, they paid salaries, but they brought in the equipment that
was needed and paid, directly, for work done with it. So, he believed,
the problem of corruption of the Afghan government then was far less
than today.
The military policy of the Americans, he said, was roughly comparable
to the Russian. That is, except that it was more simple then: you
either fought or you collaborated. Today, the mixing of civic action,
counterinsurgency, military occupation and special operations makes a
complex combination. However, reliance on the military did not work
for the Russians and, he believed strongly, would not work for the
Americans today.
What about the Russian involvement today? I asked.
There are two aspects, he replied. First, the Russians are worried
about the Central Asians and Caucasians who have come to fight for the
Taliban. What are they going to do when they go home? He wondered.
"Some people," he said, "think that they will have just grown old and
become tired of war. But I am not so sure." They are hardened
veterans, and maybe they will take home what they learned here. The
second aspect, he said, is that if the Taliban win, they and their
version of PanIslamism will make an impact on the republics of former
Soviet Central Asia.
I laughed and said, "the Domino theory in reverse." He nodded.
"However," he continued, "wherever the al-Qaida people are today, it
is important to remember that they were involved here before the
Taliban arrived. The Taliban found Usama bin Ladin already here. I
suppose their getting together was a matter of money. The Taliban had
almost none and the Saudis had a lot. It was a natural alliance."
I commented that I understood that about a year ago, the Taliban put
Usama under what I guessed could be called "cave arrest." Avetisyan
laughed and said "there are many reports." Unquestionably, there have
been severe strains in their relationship. I do not think that they
will exercise major influence on the Taliban. Nor will the Taliban
give them a free hand.
Returning to my major interest, I pressed about how and when one could
think of getting out. He said that it would take at least 5 years to
develop an Afghan army, and that to get out quickly now would probably
plunge the country back into civil war.
I pursued the point. Should we consider early negotiations or wait? He
replied that to negotiate now would be difficult because the Karzai
government is so obviously weak. The Taliban, he said, have their men
in every office of the government and there are no secrets from them.
I mentioned that after the Vietnam war ended, we discovered that the
South Vietnamese President's chief of office admitted to having worked
for the Viet Minh throughout the war. "Well," he said, "it is even
more pronounced here. The Taliban are everywhere."
I mentioned that I was hearing that there are three options: get out
now or very soon; pull out the main military forces but leave behind
"Special Ops" forces; or negotiate.
He replied that, of course, we must negotiate. Indeed, he said, his
information was that it was now on-going among the Afghans, but that
the Pakistanis were disturbed when the Afghans tried to do it alone.
He mentioned the Pakistani arrest a couple of months ago of two senior
Taliban who were involved in negotiations. (This was reported and
variously interpreted in the Western press.) But we could and must
help the negotiation process, he said. He felt that in the context of
negotiation, it would be possible to begin to pull out, but that it
should not be precipitate.
The worst of all, he said, was what I had set out as the second
option: to take out the regular military and leave behind the Special
Forces which operate like the Soviet Spetssnaz. It would be far better
to keep the regular army even at the high point it has reached (which
is larger than the Soviet force level) than to rely on the Special
Forces. The Special Forces are particularly hated by the Afghans, as
were the Spetssnaz, and, actually, are responsible for most of the
really glaring abuses here. They would ruin what reputation we have
left. That would not be good for anyone, Russia included.
I remarked that of course we could not control negotiations. He agreed
and said that he thought the Afghans could handle that when they
decided that they had to.
Could we not create that condition? I asked. That is, by setting a
firm date for withdrawal? That would not undercut our position or
marked affect the Taliban strategy. After all, I pointed out, assuming
that they are reasonably in touch with the outside world, the Taliban
leaders will know that support for continued military action here has
dropped to near zero in much of Europe and is in free fall among those
Americans who previously were the war's main advocates. As an example
I mentioned the recent Newsweek article by Richard Haass (the
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, which I have mentioned
above) under the title, "We can't win and it isn't worth it."
What setting a date would do, I argued, would take us to the position
he had just mentioned the Russians were careful to create, separating
the economic from the military policy. The purpose of what I had in
mind, I went on, was to change the "political psychology" of the war.
Then, or gradually, village shuras, jirgas or ulus would come to see
that the opening of a clinic or building a canal was not a tactic in
the war. Rather, it was a benefit to the villagers. They would want
those things and would protect them. Then, if the Taliban opposed,
they would lose the support of the people. He said that he absolutely
agreed with this. "It is the only way."
I then laid out what I would like to see happen here: the reassertion,
with suitable modifications, of the traditional idea of the state.
That is, a central government with sufficient military power to
protect itself and punish aggression but with most emphasis on the
economic and cultural means of integration. For example, using foreign
aid, controlled by the central government through something like the
American Corps of Engineers to undertake the major infrastructure
projects. Under this arrangement, the central government would control
foreign affairs including the generation of foreign aid while the
provinces would handle their local affairs in accordance with their
cultural traditions. Over time their policies would be influenced or
swayed by the central government through the offer of opportunities
for technical training and education and funding for development
projects. Fairly rapidly, I thought, people in the provinces would be
attracted to the things the central government could offer. Again, he
agreed, saying that is the only real hope for the country.
"One can see," he amplified my thought, "that we have done far too
little on education. There is no point in doing more big projects if
the Afghans do not know how to handle them and do not regard them as
their own."
We finally came to an issue on which he thinks we could beneficially
cooperate. The Salang Pass through the Hindu Kush mountains needs to
be rebuilt. It is the only feasible, economically viable passage
between Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent. It would enable the
Afghans to ship their goods more cheaply to the outside world. It also
is the supply route for the American army. And, perhaps most important
of all, it could be a joint Russian-American project which would both
symbolize and effect the transition from the still-remembered Cold War
to a new era of peace and stability. I promised to discuss it both
with our AID director here and with friends in Washington. I think it
could really be the best thing to come out of Afghanistan in many
years.
Sadly, I was not able to see either the former Minister of Finance,
Ashraf Ghani, or the current Minister of Finance, Omar Zakhilwal, both
of whom are out of the country. Ghani, I am told, really ran
Afghanistan for several years until President Karzai became jealous
and decided to get rid of him. Zakhilwal, I was told, is not of his
caliber but is also an able and intelligent man. As people here said –
a threat or a promise, I am not sure – "next time." 20
Always seeking balance in what I was hearing, I arranged to have
dinner with the Afghanistan correspondent of The Guardian and The
Economist, Jon Boone, and the correspondent for The Times, Jerome
Starkey, at a little restaurant with banquets in place of tables and
chairs, the Afghan style, called "the Sufi." I was wary about going
there because the name sufi means "woolen" and is applied to that
group of Muslims who most closely resemble the mendicant followers of
St. Francis of Assisi – and they certainly did not care much about the
quality of their food! It actually turned out to be a very pleasant
place – that is, after one passed through a cordon of armed guards and
the metal detector -- with an Afghanesque seating arrangement on rugs
with cushions. But after an hour, I began to feel my legs, tucked up
underneath me, grow numb. No longer am I the man who rode a camel
across Arabia! I could not be sure quite what I was eating in the dim
light, but the food, very Afghan, was very tasty. Anyway, I was not
there for the food but to listen to their opinions on the current
situation.
Their opinions differed. Boone, an Oxford man who has been here three
years, thought that any serious move toward evacuation would throw the
country back into civil war while Starkey thought that a descent into
civil war much less likely and that, since leaving would happen
anyway, it was a good idea to begin negotiation soon. Both agreed that
the current government is hopelessly corrupt and not really
reformable. Boone placed his hopes on the police, which he thought
would take five years to get in shape. He thought parts of the army,
particularly the Afghan Special Forces, some of whose officers had
been trained at Sand Hurst, were relatively sound, but only in the
officer corps. The regular soldiers, he and Starkey agreed, were at
best unmotivated and at worst would swing quickly to the Taliban.
Both commented on the massive flight of money, which I have discussed
above. Boone remarked that the amount being exported shifted,
depending on the Afghan evaluation of the length of the American
commitment. He also pointed to an aspect of the Karzai policy I had
not been aware of: the government goes into the market place, here
literally a market place, once a week and buys up Afghan currency
(Afs) with dollars. This has the effect of driving up the price of the
local currency, and so enables those who want to take out dollars to
buy them more cheaply and giving them a profit even before the money
gets abroad. In short, Afghan government financial practice was
subsidizing the flight of currency to the benefit of the inner circle
and the warlords.
What do the Americans know about this? I asked. Probably everything,
both men replied, but this thought led them to comment on the fact
that practically no American ever leaves the Embassy compound. That
was only in part a criticism as both Boone and Starkey men thought it
was probably better that the Americans were less evident because,
decked out in their body armor and helmets and surrounded by guards,
they were not popular. Both said the most disliked were the Special
Forces (aka "Special Ops") who are believed to carry out at least a
thousand raids a month (!) and often with considerable brutality and
always with little regard for Afghan customs. Both remarked that until
WikiLeaks published some of records, no one even here had any idea
about the scale or impact of this intrusion. Both regarded these raids
as a major cause of hatred of Americans and a great danger to the
American strategy.
My last journalist contact was Joshua Partlow of The Washington Post.
He very kindly invited me to his house – which he more or less
inherited when an attack on the UN guest house induced the UN to make
all of its personnel leave outlying 21 houses. The house, by American
standards, was modest, but like all the buildings I entered, it
mustered its complement of armed guards and the double door entry. As
I walked in, I mused on what percentage of our income is today devoted
to "security." Here in Afghanistan, it must just about match the
amount paid out in bribes.
As I walked into the living room, I saw a huge double bass in the
corner. How wonderful, I thought, for a young reporter way off in the
Wild East to have brought this monstrous fiddle with him. What a task
that must have been! He must be really devoted to music. When I asked,
he laughed and said, no, he did not play and did not even know where
the fiddle came from. It was in the house when he moved in, perhaps
abandoned by some previous occupant. Now, he said, it was just
decoration.
Partlow shared the house with several other people including another
Washington Post reporter, David Nakamura and, Victoria Longo, a young
woman working at the UN office here. Also joining us for dinner were
Keith Shawe, a English botanist who worked for The Asia Foundation, an
organization that was already active in Afghanistan when I first came
here in 1962, and a young Chinese-American women, fresh from working
at the USAID mission in Kandahar.
To my astonishment, Partlow produced a rare bottle of wine, and
powered by the unusual event, we went unraveled the Afghan
predicament. Of course, that meant going over much the same ground as
all my other conversations, violence, corruption, the question of how
much or little the official Americans saw or understood of the
country, and where this is all heading. In summary, I found that they
were just as pessimistic as the better informed of my other contacts.
The young Chinese-American woman, Bayfang, had worked as a reporter
before joining AID to work in Kandahar. So she had experienced both
the freedom of the reporters and the "security" of the officials. She
remarked on how hard it was to get permission to go out of the guarded
compound where, as in Kabul, all the official Americans lived, and
then only in body armor and with guards. No wonder, she said, the
Americans could not understand the country. They hardly saw it. The
reporters, of course, used local transport, mainly taxis, and usually
went by themselves to call on Afghans or foreigners in pursuit of
their stories. The evening turned into a sort of college bull session.
They were all pessimistic. Things are going downhill.
Now I have the last and most interesting of all my talks now to
relate. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was the Taliban's head of the central
bank, deputy minister of finance, acting minister of defense and
ambassador to Pakistan. In short, he was one of the most important men
in the Taliban establishment. When Pakistan withdrew its recognition
of the Taliban government in 2001, he was abducted and packed off to
Bagram prison, to another prison in Kandahar and finally to
Guantánamo. Among them, as he recounts in his autobiography, My Life
With The Taliban, he was humiliated, repeatedly tortured, almost
starved, sat upon, spat upon, cursed, almost always deprived of a
chance to pray, had his Qur'an sullied and deprived of sleep for days
on end. Finally after four years he released in 2005 without charges
and allowed to return to Afghanistan. He now lives, more or less under
house arrest, in Kabul.
Arranging to see him also brought back memories for me: many years ago
in Cairo, I met and got to know Prince Abdul Karim al-Khatabi, the
leader of the failed Rif war of liberation against the Spaniards and
the French. He too was packed off to exile and held incommunicado by
the French during the entire period of World War II. 22 Khatabi's and
Zaeef's lives and personalities and social background were very
different, as were their experiences – Prince Abdul Karim was treated
with respect whereas Mullah Abdul Salam was tortured -- but both were
leaders of their national revolts. So, I approached this opportunity
with excitement. I thought I could learn a great deal from him.
By taxi, I went to see Mullah Abdul Salam with a translator. It took
about an hour to reach his neighborhood. We wandered about for a long
time, unable to find the house. The district had been virtually
destroyed in the civil war and the area where his house showed all the
effects of both war and Afghan poverty. The streets were flanked by
the usual open sewers (juis) and almost blocked by rubbish and the
remains of collapsed buildings. When we arrived, I went into the
doorway past the usual collection armed guards and up a modest flight
of cement steps, then, as custom required, after taking off my shoes,
I went into Mullah Abdul Salam's bare, but sofa-encircled reception
room. Rising, Mullah Abdul Salam greeted me shyly. I was not
surprised. After all, I was an unknown American and from his book and
the comments of my journalist new friends, I expected that he would be
at least wary if not hostile. I wasn't sure what language we would use
so I said to my translator to say how much I had looked forward to
meeting him after reading his book. The translator spoke a few words
to him, paused and then said, "sir, he wants to speak in English."
Since Pashto is Zaeef's native language, my Farsi speaking translator
was perhaps in as weak a language position as I.
So, during our talk, we went back and forth between English and Arabic
which, as a religious scholar, he spoke very well. Mullah Abdul Salam
is now 42 years old and was born in a village near Kandahar. His
father was the imam of a village mosque and the family, probably even
more than any of his farming neighbors, was very poor. His mother died
when he was a baby, of what he does not know, perhaps in childbirth.
His older sister died shortly thereafter and his father, when he was
still a child. As he recounts in his autobiography, his youth was
grim. He was shunted from one relative to another and had to struggle
for the little education, both religious and secular, he got. When the
Russians invaded in 1979, he joined the great exodus of millions –
ultimately 6 million or about one Afghan in each two – to Pakistan
where he lived in several of the wretched refugee camps. At 15, he ran
away from "home," if one can call a refugee tent that, joined the
resistance against the Soviet invasion, fought as a guerrilla, was
caught in some nine ambushes and was severely wounded. During this
time, he joined the Taliban, as he told me, because it was more
honest, less brutal and more religious than the other resistance
groups. By the time, he joined it, Mullah Muhammad Umar had become the
Taliban leader. At the end of the Soviet occupation, the various
guerrilla factions split, fought one another and, in the desperate
struggle for survival, becoming "warlords," preyed upon the general
population. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Taliban, as he recounted,
had stood down or, more accurately, had returned to their schools and
mosques. Finally, in reaction to the warlords' extortions, rapes and
murders, the Taliban coalesced and reemerged. Then began a period of
negotiation, missionary activity in the name of Islam and finally
fighting that led the by-then greatly expanded Taliban into control of
most of Afghanistan and catapulted Mullah Abdul Salam into its most
difficult civil tasks.
Today, those difficult times, and his even worse years in prison,
hardly show. He has just been removed from the UN and US "blacklist,"
and now, as I found, lives modestly in Kabul. He is a big man, not fat
but portly, with penetrating black eyes and a modest black beard. I
was at some pains to establish at least the beginnings of trust
between us and must have succeeded because we spoke with some humor
(always a good sign) and candor. In our talk, I found no sign of
animosity toward me or even, as I expected from his autobiography,
toward America and Americans. After preliminaries, I asked what he saw
ahead and how the Afghan tragedy could be solved.
In reply, he said, " it is very hard to devise a way, but we should
know that fighting is not the way. It won't work. And it has many bad
side effects such as dividing the people for the government."
Given his background I was surprised by his concern for Karzai's
government. But as we talked, it was clear that he was thinking in
terms broader than Karzai. He meant that the Afghans must have an
accommodation to government, per se, if they are heal their wounds and
improve their condition.
The only realistic way ahead, he went on, "is respect for the Afghan
people and their way whereas America is now relying wholly on force.
Force didn't work for the British or the Russians and it won't work
for the Americans." (I doubt that Mullah Abdul Salam could have heard
it, but his opinion was borne out by the commander of one of the US
strike forces in southern Afghanistan, Lt. Col. David Flynn, a career
officer who also had served in Iraq. He told a reporter from The
Mclatchy Newspapers on August 19, "We've killed hundreds and thousands
of Taliban over nine years, and killing another thousand this year is
not going to be the difference.") The word "respect" often figured in
his remarks, as from my study of Afghanistan and the Arabs and
Iranians, I knew it would.
But instead of working toward peace, he said and I paraphrase, America
has created obstacles to peace which only it can remove. But here, he
said, was a complete block: America has put the Taliban leaders on a
black list, a "wanted" list, and they know that they will be killed if
they surface to negotiate. Without their removal from the "capture or
kill" list and a guarantee of safety from kidnap or murder, they
cannot negotiate; trying to make contact with the Karzai regime is
sure to get them killed. Perhaps they have even tried. He said that he
did not know if Karzai and any of the Taliban leadership were in
contact, but under these circumstances, he doubted it. While he
admitted (and the Taliban have announced) that he is not authorized to
speak for Mullah Muhammad Umar, he thought that the American troops
did not need actually to pull out before negotiations could begin. If
it was certain that they were going to do so, then negotiations could
be got underway. That seemed to contradict some of the Taliban
pronouncements, demanding withdrawal before negotiation, but it is, I
believe, itself a negotiable issue.
So how do the Taliban see a post-US-controlled Afghanistan? I asked.
He replied that "it all depended on how it comes about. If it comes
through negotiation, then probably the Taliban will be content with
genuine participation in the government, but if it comes through
force, then the Taliban will take everything."
I asked about what he has been doing since his autobiography was
translated. He perhaps did not quite understand my question and said
that he was in Guantánamo until he was released. He suddenly asked me
how old I am and, when I replied with my august status, he said "good.
There was a man in Guantanamo who also was old and he was gentle with
me. The younger men were not."
That brought up the question of the American policy of targeting and
killing the leadership. I said that I thought that such actions would
open the way for younger, more radical men. Yes, he agreed, that would
certainly happen but the senior, "old," leadership is still intact,
living, he said, off somewhere in Pakistan. The usual guess is in the
city of Quetta, which historically was a part of Afghanistan.
I turned to the issue of al-Qaida, saying that their activities, their
composition and their relationship with the Taliban was what really
interested most Americans. He confirmed what the Russian ambassador
had told me: Usama bin Ladin was already operating in Afghanistan
before the Taliban came into power. Of course, Mullah Abdul Salam
said, almost echoing the words of the Russian ambassador, the Taliban
needed money and Usama was almost the only available source. All the
Afghans, Mullah Abdul Salam emphasized, have the tradition of granting
sanctuary (melmastia) to a guest. It is mandatory. Moreover, Usama was
the enemy of the enemies of the Taliban. So there was an
understanding. But after 2002, he said, "that understanding lapsed,
asylum for Usama was withdrawn and the Qaida fighters, including
Usama, are no longer in Afghanistan. [American military and
intelligence sources have publicly confirmed this.] They will not come
back. The Taliban will not allow them to return."
When Mullah Abdul Salam returned to Afghanistan, he said, he three
times met with President Karzai who asked him to participate in the
great national assembly, the Loya Jirga. He said he told Karzai that
it was not proper to have a Loya Jirga during occupation by foreign
forces and urged him not to hold it. He also told Karzai, he said, he
personally could not, under the circumstances, participate. I asked if
he saw Americans. Yes, he replied an American general once came to
call on him, asking what was the best way to arm Afghans to fight the
Taliban.
He didn't laugh, as I expected he would.
What about the American aid program? I asked. Granting aid, he said,
had a bad effect "because it split families. If a man took American
money, making him a traitor to Afghanistan and to Islam, his own
brother was apt to kill him." But, I said, in other circumstances
would it not be good? "Oh, certainly," he replied. So, I added, then
we must change the circumstances. He nodded. Musing, he said he was
often asked to compare the Russians and the Americans. On the good
side, he said, the Russians came by invitation from an existing
government whereas the Americans invaded. But, on the bad side, the
Russians were far more brutal than the Americans, bombing whole
villages, killing perhaps a million people. On their side, he went on,
the Americans at least brought the UN with them and that was a good
thing for Afghanistan. The Americans, however, were here only in
opposition to the Russians and when there was no Russian threat they
left. I was surprised by what I inferred was almost nostalgia in his
remark. It was nearly what I had heard from Dr. Samar on the role
America could have played in 2002.
I then raised the issue of the brutality of the Taliban. I did not
mention the recent UN report on the injuries inflicted by the Taliban
on Afghan civilians as I am sure he would think that these are
inevitable in a guerrilla war. Instead, I raised the issue of the
execution by stoning of an Afghan woman. I remarked that such barbaric
practice gave a horrible image of the Taliban even though such
execution was authorized by both the Old Testament and the Qur'an. But
we no longer believed in it. Can the Taliban modernize? I asked.
He shrugged. "What can you expect now? The Taliban are completely
isolated, under constant attack, and naturally this throws them back
onto old ways. They cannot afford to relax even on such matters."
I asked about his own religious observance. It being Ramadan, he was
of course fasting. I asked if he went to the little mosque I had seen
nearby in his capacity as a mullah. Oh no, he said, he was not allowed
to for his own safety. That remark also surprised me. Was he afraid of
the Taliban? I asked. He rather ducked that question, saying only that
he did go to the mosque for the Friday congregational prayer. But,
although he did not specify, it was clear that in the circumstances of
Afghanistan today, as I saw everywhere I turned, almost anyone of any
standing was unsure where danger might arise. Also, the government
would not probably not approve his attendance at a place where he
might influence the population. Better to pray at home.
He said he has written a second book, also in Pashto, somewhat like
his first. The publishers of his autobiography, he said, refused to
pay him royalties as he was on the black list. So he asked that they
just hold the money, but, in the end, they refused to give him
anything. I suggested that he should write an article on how to end
the war and plan to contact Rick MacArthur to see if Harpers would be
interested.
Abdul Salam has been invited, he said, by the European parliament to
visit Europe. But he had not applied for a visa. He said he had only
recently been free to do so, and he had to remember that he was a
guest in the country and must not do anything that might embarrass his
hosts. [WRP: I have discussed elsewhere the limits of refuge and the
control of "guests."]
As I was leaving, he said that he was expecting the German ambassador.
And, indeed, as I went out, there were four big armored cars with a
dozen or so men armed with wicked looking machineguns, eyeing me
suspiciously, and a small group of German diplomats, waiting to go in.
I was amused that they did not even look sheepish when, by myself
without armed guards, I walked passed them to my taxi.
--
Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear
of punishment and hope of reward after death." --
Albert Einstein !!!
http://www.scribd.com/doc/22151765/History-of-Pakistan-Army-from-1757-to-1971
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http://www.scribd.com/doc/22455178/Letters-to-Command-and-Staff-College-Quetta-Citadel-Journal
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http://www.scribd.com/doc/22457862/Pakistan-Army-Journal-The-Citadel
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