Legacy II: Afghanistan
ON September 11, 2001 a team of al Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes in the United States, two planes destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one damaged the Pentagon in Washington, and one crashed when the passengers attacked the hijackers.
The United States, demanding justice, requested the Taliban Afghan government to hand over the criminals who planned, financed, and directed the attack. The Afghan government refused. The United States went to war, rapidly destroying the Taliban government, driving it out of Afghanistan.
The chief criminal of the plot, Osama bin Laden, escaped. At this point, attempts to capture the criminal Bin Laden were subordinated to rebuilding Afghanistan. For the past six years the United States and its allies have struggled to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan able to provide security to the people and achieve development of the economy.
What has President Bush achieved? Historically, Afghanistan has been a nation extraordinarily difficult to conquer or to govern. The slogans and arguments of growth, democracy, governance seems of limited relevance for Afghanistan.
The Taliban who survived the American attack fled to Pakistan; over the past six years the movement re-armed and rebuilt itself. The group has made modest progress in regaining influence but, while determined, these lightly armed soldiers do not have the firepower to defeat the Afghan government and its Nato allies.
The current government of Afghanistan has never had real control of the country. The difficult transport conditions, the variety of ethnic grouping, the widespread commitment to narcotics cultivation and trading as a way of life, and the extreme conservatism of a patriarchal society foreshadowed the failure of Bush's nation building objectives.
The focus on Iraq possibly allowed the Taliban to regroup, but more likely the difficulties in Afghanistan are inherent and cannot be overcome. However, the lack of decisiveness in controlling narcotics led to a resurgence of Afghanistan's participation in world drug markets.
Thus, in Afghanistan, Bush has failed to achieve his objectives. Success seems remote: The Taliban remains strong and have not and will not give up. So long as they have refuge in Pakistan, largely beyond the reach of the United States, it will prove very difficult to completely destroy the Taliban movement.
The importance of narcotics has increased, in sharp contrast with the period of Taliban rule when the narcotics business was virtually closed. The rule of the central government is weak.
Apart from the Kabul government, Afghans do not really support the presence of Americans and her allies. In particular, the leaders of the drug industry fear the Americans will soon turn on the poppy fields, destroying them with chemicals.
There is fatigue setting in among the United States and its allies; a feeling that the task is endless and the direction wrong. Pakistan's role is ever more obscure; originally a founder of the Taliban, now an enemy?
The governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan are at loggerheads, unwilling to get along, their rhetoric growing by the day. While Iraq has a quite sophisticated population with a long history of culture, education and achievement, Afghanistan is far less developed, with a lower level of education, urbanisation, and only about one-tenth of the per capita income.
The failure of the Bush administration in Afghanistan is two-fold. First, the inability to limit the growth of the narcotics industry. The drug business fundamentally corrupts the society, undermines social cohesion, promotes drug use and addiction, and builds illegal activity as the dominant part of the economy. Second, the inability to build a central government that is able to rule. Bush's failure in Afghanistan is not unusual, rather it follows a history of similar failures of persons and nations who believed that they could manipulate and change that part of our globe.
Where is Afghanistan going? Bush and his allies have no clear purpose, only meaningless slogans. Nato will probably continue for a few more years to try and solve the security and development problems and then declare success and go home.
The narcotics business will thrive, bringing increasing heroin to the streets of America, Europe and Asia. Some version of the Taliban will gain influence in southern Afghanistan.
Low key fighting in the provinces will continue. The Afghan government will rule the enclave of Kabul, but most of the population will not pay much attention. Donor organisations will strive without success to establish an effective central government.
Without a revenue base, interference by all neighbours and an unwillingness to conform to rule by the centre, none of these aspirations will be achieved. The total impact of all this effort on the average family in Afghanistan will be virtually zero.
After the attack of 9/11, and the Afghan government's refusal to turn the criminals over to the United States, the consequences were inevitable. Any US president would have done the same. Events have developed more or less as expected, not because of Bush but because of the attack on the United States.
Afghanistan faces a bleak future: poverty, internal conflict, growing drug addiction and steady criminalisation of the society. The condition is not the consequence of Bush's policies but rather more of the same in the long line of Afghan history, along with the wealth and personal alienation of much of the west.
Afghanistan is one of the better examples where the world's leaders have substituted theology for reality. The secular theology to promote democracy is perhaps only a cover for the use of military force, but there are many who take the development of democracy very seriously. But the use of military force in Afghanistan is likely to lead only to perpetual fighting, an unsustainable undertaking. Without the western military forces, Afghanistan will plunge into continuous low-level conflict.
The Bush legacy in Afghanistan is the inevitable consequence of the September 11 attack on the United States. This whole enterprise will eventually be abandoned by the US and Nato, leaving it to others to continue the conflicts. The most worthwhile action to take is to destroy the poppy fields using chemicals. Such an act is in the genuine interest of Europe and the United States.
Forget nation building, recognise that governance is an intractable problem, and go after the poppy fields. If there is any aggression here it is the Afghan production of drugs sent to the rest of the world. Ironically, it seems to me, the evidence indicates that the reality is the opposite of common belief -- Iraq is a success, Afghanistan a failure. The policy implications, for the United States are: stay in Iraq, get out of Afghanistan. But the West must first protect its citizens from the Afghan aggression in harming its citizen with drugs.
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