Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of
international unity as that which greeted the invasion of
Afghanistan in 2001. Support for the war was universal in the
chanceries of the West, even before its aims and parameters
had been declared. nato governments rushed to assert themselves ‘all
for one’. Blair jetted round the world, proselytizing the ‘doctrine of the
international community’ and the opportunities for peace-keeping and
nation-building in the Hindu Kush. Putin welcomed the extension of
American bases along Russia’s southern borders. Every mainstream
Western party endorsed the war; every media network—with bbc World
and cnn in the lead—became its megaphone. For the German Greens,
as for Laura Bush and Cherie Blair, it was a war for the liberation of the
women of Afghanistan. [1] For the White House, a fight for civilization. For
Iran, the impending defeat of the Wahhabi enemy.

Three years later, as the chaos in Iraq deepened, Afghanistan became
the ‘good war’ by comparison. It had been legitimized by the un—even
if the resolution was not passed until after the bombs had finished
falling—and backed by nato. If tactical differences had sharpened over
Iraq, they could be resolved in Afghanistan. First Zapatero, then Prodi,
then Rudd, compensated for pulling troops out of Iraq by dispatching
them to Kabul. [2] France and Germany could extol their peace-keeping
or civilizing roles there. As suicide bombings increased in Baghdad,
Afghanistan was now—for American Democrats keen to prove their
‘security’ credentials—the ‘real front’ of the war on terror, supported
by every us presidential candidate in the run-up to the 2008 elections,
with Senator Obama pressuring the White House to violate Pakistani
sovereignty whenever necessary. With varying degrees of firmness,
the occupation of Afghanistan was also supported by China, Iran and
Russia; though in the case of the latter, there was always a strong element
of Schadenfreude. Soviet veterans of the Afghan war were amazed
to see their mistakes now being repeated by the United States in a war
even more inhumane than its predecessor.

Meanwhile, the number of Afghan civilians killed has exceeded many
tens of times over the 2,746 who died in Manhattan. Unemployment
is around 60 per cent and maternal, infant and child mortality levels
are now among the highest in the world. Opium harvests have soared,
and the ‘Neo-Taliban’ is growing stronger year by year. By common
consent, Karzai’s government does not even control its own capital, let
alone provide an example of ‘good governance’. Reconstruction funds
vanish into cronies’ pockets or go to pay short-contract Western consultants.
Police are predators rather than protectors. The social crisis is
deepening. Increasingly, Western commentators have evoked the spectre
of failure—usually in order to spur encore un effort. A Guardian leader
summarizes: ‘Defeat looks possible, with all the terrible consequences
that will bring.’ [3]

Two principal arguments, often overlapping, are put forward as to ‘what
went wrong’ in Afghanistan. For liberal imperialists, the answer can
e summarized in two words: ‘not enough’. The invasion organized by
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld was done on the cheap. The ‘light footprint’
demanded by the Pentagon meant that there were too few troops on the
ground in 2001–02. Financial commitment to ‘state-building’ was insuf-
ficient. Though it may now be too late, the answer is to pour in more
troops, more money—‘multiple billions’ over ‘multiple years’, according
to the us Ambassador in Kabul. [4] The second answer—advanced by
Karzai and the White House, but propagated by the Western media
generally—can be summed up in one word: Pakistan. Neither of these
arguments holds water.

 Political failures

True, there was a sense of relief in Kabul when the Taliban’s Wahhabite
Emirate was overthrown. Though rape and heroin production had been
curtailed under their rule, warlords kept at bay and order largely restored
in a country that had been racked by foreign and civil wars since 1979,
the end result had been a ruthless social dictatorship with a level of
control over the everyday lives of ordinary people that made the clerical
regime in Iran appear an island of enlightenment. The Taliban government
fell without a serious struggle. Islamabad, officially committed
to the us cause, forbade any frontal confrontation. [5] Some Taliban zealots
crossed the border into Pakistan, while a more independent faction
loyal to Mullah Omar decamped to the mountains to fight another day.
Kabul was undefended; the bbc war correspondent entered the capital
before the Northern Alliance. What many Afghans now expected
from a successor government was a similar level of order, minus the
repression and social restrictions, and a freeing of the country’s spirit.
What they were instead presented with was a melancholy spectacle that
blasted all their hopes.

The problem was not lack of funds but the Western state-building
project itself, by its nature an exogenous process—aiming to construct
an army able to suppress its own population but incapable of defending
the nation from outside powers; a civil administration with no control
over planning or social infrastructure, which are in the hands of Western
ngos; and a government whose foreign policy marches in step with
Washington’s. It bore no relation to the realities on the ground. After the
fall of the Taliban government, four major armed groups re-emerged as
strong regional players. In the gas-rich and more industrialized north,
bordering the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, the
Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum was in charge with his capital in Mazari-
Sharif. Allied first to the Communists, later the Taliban and most
recently nato, General Dostum had demonstrated his latest loyalty by
massacring 2–3,000 Taliban and Arab prisoners under the approving
gaze of us intelligence personnel in December 2001.

Not too far from Dostum, in the mountainous north-east of the country,
a region rich in emeralds, lapis lazuli and opium, the late Ahmed
Shah Masoud had built a fighting organization of Tajiks, who regularly
ambushed troops on the Salang Highway that linked Kabul to Tashkent
during the Soviet occupation. Masoud had been the leader of the armed
wing of Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamaat-i-Islami, which operated in tandem
with an allied Islamist leader, Abd al-Rabb Sayyaf (both men were
lecturers in sharia at the law faculty of Kabul University in 1973, where
these movements were incubated). Until 1993 they were funded by Saudi
Arabia, after which the latter gradually shifted its support to the Taliban.
Masoud maintained a semi-independence during the Taliban period, up
to his death on 9 September 2001. [6] Masoud’s supporters are currently
in the government, but are not considered one hundred per cent reliable
as far as nato is concerned.

To the west, sheltered by neighbouring Iran, lies the ancient city of Herat,
once a centre of learning and culture where poets, artists and scholars
flourished. Among the important works illustrated here over the course of
three centuries was a 15^th-century version of the classic Miraj-nameh, an
early medieval account of the Prophet’s ascent to heaven from the Dome
of the Rock and the punishments he observed as he passed through hell. [7]

In modern Herat, the Shia warlord Ismail Khan holds sway. A former
army captain inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ismail achieved
instant fame by leading a garrison revolt against the pro-Moscow regime
in 1979. Backed by Teheran he built up a strong force that united all the
Shia groups and were to trouble the Russians throughout their stay. Tens
of thousands of refugees from this region (where a Persian dialect is the
spoken language) were given work, shelter and training in Iran. From
1992–95, the province was run on authoritarian lines. It was a harsh
regime: Ismail Khan’s half-witted effrontery soon began to alienate his
allies, while his high-tax and forced conscription policies angered peasant
families. By the time the Taliban took power in Kabul in 1996, support
had already drained away from the warlord. Herat fell without a struggle,
and Ismail was imprisoned by the Taliban, only escaping in March 2000.
His supporters meanwhile crossed the border to Iran where they bided
their time, to return in October 2001 under nato cover.

The south was another story again. The Pashtun villages bore the brunt
of the fighting during the 1980s and 90s.8 Rapid population growth,
coupled with the disruptions of war and the resulting loss of livestock,
hastened the collapse of the subsistence economy. In many districts
this was replaced by poppy cultivation and the rule of local bandits and
strongmen. By the early 1990s, three militant Sunni groups had acquired
dominance in the region: the Taliban, the group led by Ahmed Shah
Masoud from the Panjsher province, and the followers of Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, once Pakistan’s favourite, who had been groomed by the
Saudis as the new leader. The jihad was long over, and now the jihadis
were at each other’s throats, with control of the drug trade the major
stake in a brutal power struggle. Under Benazir Bhutto’s second premiership,
Pakistan’s military backing for the Taliban proved decisive.

But the overthrow of the Mullah Omar government in the winter of 2001
saw the re-emergence of many of the local gangsters whose predations
it had partly checked.

 Anointment of Karzai

Washington assigned the task of assembling a new government to Zalmay
Khalilzad, its Afghan-American pro-consul in Kabul. The capital was
occupied by competing militias, united only by opposition to the toppled
Taliban, and their representatives had to be accommodated on every level.
The Northern Alliance candidate for president, Abdul Haq of Jalalabad,
had conveniently been captured and executed in October 2001 by the
Taliban when he entered the country with a small group from Pakistan.
(His supporters alleged betrayal by the cia and the isi, who were unhappy
about his links to Russia and Iran, and tipped off Mullah Omar.) Another
obvious anti-Taliban candidate was Ahmed Shah Masoud; but he had
8 Afghanistan’s ethnography has generated a highly politicized statistical debate. The
6-year survey carried out by a Norwegian foundation is probably the most accurate.

This suggests that Pashtuns make up an estimated 63 per cent of the population,
along with the mainly Persian-speaking Tajiks (12 per cent), Uzbeks (9 per cent)
and the mainly Shia Hazaras (6 per cent): wak Foundation, Norway 1999. The
cia Factbook, by contrast, gives 42, 27, 9 and 9 per cent respectively. The tiny non-
Muslim minority of Hindus and Sikhs, mainly shopkeepers and traders in Kabul,
were displaced by the Taliban; some were killed, and thousands fled to India.
also been killed—by a suicide bomber of unknown provenance—two
days before 9.11. Masoud would no doubt have been the eu choice for
Afghan president, had he lived; the French government issued a postage
stamp with his portrait, and Kabul airport bears his name. Whether he
would have proved as reliable a client as Khalilzad’s transplanted protégé,
Hamid Karzai, must now remain an open question.

Aware that the us could not run the country without the Northern
Alliance and its backers in Teheran and Moscow, Khalilzad toned down
the emancipatory rhetoric and concentrated on the serious business of
occupation. The coalition he constructed resembled a blind octopus, with
mainly Tajik limbs and Karzai as its unseeing eye. The Afghan president
comes from the Durrani tribe of Pashtuns from Kandahar. His father had
served in a junior capacity in Zahir Shah’s government. Young Karzai
backed the mujaheddin against Russia and later supported the Taliban,
though he turned down their offer to become Afghanistan’s Ambassador
to the un, preferring to relocate and work for unocal. Here he backed
up Khalilzad, who was then representing CentGas in their bid to construct
a pipeline that would take gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to
Pakistan and India. [8]

After his appointment as interim president, the Saudi daily Al-Watan
published a revealing profile of Karzai, stating that he had been a cia
pawn since the 80s, with his status on the Afghan chessboard enhanced
every few years:

Since then, Karzai’s ties with the Americans have not been interrupted. At
the same time, he established ties with the British and other European and
international sides, especially after he became deputy foreign minister in
1992 in the wake of the Afghan mujaheddin’s assumption of power and the
overthrow of the pro-Moscow Najibullah regime. Karzai found no contradiction
between his ties with the Americans and his support for the Taliban
movement as of 1994, when the Americans had—secretly and through the
Pakistanis—supported the Taliban’s assumption of power to put an end to
the civil war and the actual partition of Afghanistan due to the failure of
Burhanuddin Rabbani’s experience in ruling the country. [9]

Karzai was duly installed in December 2001, but intimacy with us
intelligence networks failed to translate into authority or legitimacy at
home. Karzai harboured no illusions about his popularity in the country.
He knew his biological and political life was heavily dependent on
the occupation and demanded a bodyguard of us Marines or American
mercenaries, rather than a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun
base. [10] There were at least three coup attempts against him in 2002–03
by his Northern Alliance allies; these were fought off by the isaf, which
was largely tied down in assuring Karzai’s security—while also providing
a vivid illustration of where his support lay. [11] A quick-fix presidential
contest organized at great expense by Western pr firms in October
2004—just in time for the us elections—failed to bolster support for
the puppet president inside the country. Karzai’s habit of parachuting
his relatives and protégés into provincial governor or police chief jobs
has driven many local communities into alliance with the Taliban, as the
main anti-government force. In Zabul, Helmand and elsewhere, all the
insurgents had to do was ‘approach the victims of the pro-Karzai strongmen
and promise them protection and support. Attempts by local elders
to seek protection in Kabul routinely ended nowhere, as the wrongdoers
enjoyed either direct us support or Karzai’s sympathy.’ [12]

Nor is it any secret that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai,
has now become one of the richest drug barons in the country. At a
meeting with Pakistan’s president in 2005, when Karzai was bleating
about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, Musharraf
suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his
sibling under control. (The hatred for each other of these two close allies
of Washington is well known in the region.)

 New inequalities

Also feeding the resentment is the behaviour of a new elite clustered
around Karzai and the occupying forces, which has specialized in
creaming off foreign aid to create its own criminal networks of graft
and patronage. The corruptions of this layer grow each month like an
untreated tumour. Western funds are siphoned off to build fancy homes
for the native enforcers. Housing scandals erupted as early as 2002,
when cabinet ministers awarded themselves and favoured cronies prime
real estate in Kabul where land prices were rocketing, since the occupiers
and their camp followers had to live in the style to which they were
accustomed. Karzai’s colleagues, protected by isaf troops, built their
large villas in full view of the mud-brick hovels of the poor. The burgeoning
slum settlements of Kabul, where the population has now swollen
to an estimated 3 million, are a measure of the social crisis that has
engulfed the country.

The ancient city has suffered cruelly over the past thirty years. Jade
Maiwand, the modernized ‘Oxford Street’ cut through the centre in
the 1970s, was reduced to rubble during the warfare of 1992–96. An
American-Afghan architect describes how Kabul has been relentlessly
transformed:

from a modern capital, to the military and political headquarters of an
invading army, to the besieged seat of power of a puppet regime, to the
front lines of factional conflict resulting in the destruction of two-thirds of
its urban mass, to the testing fields of religious fanaticism which erased
from the city the final layers of urban life, to the target of an international
war on terrorism. [13]

Yet never have such gaping inequalities featured on this scale before.
Little of the supposed $19 billion ‘aid and reconstruction’ money has
reached the majority of Afghans. The mains electricity supply is worse
now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to
power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite
tvs, average Kabulis ‘suffered a summer without fans and face a winter
without heaters.’ [14] As a result, hundreds of shelterless Afghans are literally
freezing to death each winter.

Then there are the ngos who descended on the country like locusts after
the occupation. As one observer reports:

A reputed 10,000 ngo staff have turned Kabul into the Klondike during
the gold rush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in
armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money,
essentially on themselves. They take orders only from some distant agency,
but then the same goes for the American army, nato, the un, the eu and
the supposedly sovereign Afghan government. [15]

Even supporters of the occupation have lost patience with these bodies,
and some of the most successful candidates in the 2005 National
Assembly elections made an attack on them a centre-piece of their campaigns.

Worse, according to one us specialist, ‘their well-funded activities
highlighted the poverty and ineffectiveness of the civil administration and
discredited its local representatives in the eyes of the local populace.’ [16]
Unsurprisingly, ngo employees began to be targeted by the insurgents,
including in the north, and had to hire mercenary protection.

In sum: even in the estimate of the West’s own specialists and institutions,
‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan has been flawed in its very
conception. It has so far produced a puppet president dependent for
his survival on foreign mercenaries, a corrupt and abusive police force,
a ‘non-functioning’ judiciary, a thriving criminal layer and a deepening
social and economic crisis. It beggars belief to argue that ‘more of this’
will be the answer to Afghanistan’s problems.

 An Afghan surge?

The argument that more nato troops are the solution is equally unsustainable.

All the evidence suggests that the brutality of the occupying
forces has been one of the main sources of recruits for the Taliban.
American air power, lovingly referred to as ‘Big Daddy’ by frightened
us soldiers on unwelcome terrain, is far from paternal when it comes
to targeting Pashtun villages. There is widespread fury among Afghans
at the number of civilian casualties, many of them children. There have
been numerous incidents of rape and rough treatment of women by
isaf soldiers, as well as indiscriminate bombing of villages and houseto-
house search-and-arrest missions. The behaviour of the foreign
mercenaries backing up the nato forces is just as bad. Even sympathetic
observers admit that ‘their alcohol consumption and patronage of
a growing number of brothels in Kabul . . . is arousing public anger and
resentment.’ [17] To this could be added the deaths by torture at the us-run
Bagram prison and the resuscitation of a Soviet-era security law under
which detainees are being sentenced to 20-year jail terms on the basis of
summary allegations by us military authorities. All this creates a thirst
for dignity that can only be assuaged by genuine independence.
Talk of ‘victory’ sounds increasingly hollow to Afghan ears. Many who
detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of nato and the behaviour
of its troops that they are pleased there is some opposition. What
was initially viewed by some locals as a necessary police action against
al-Qaeda following the 9.11 attacks is now perceived by a growing majority
in the region as a fully fledged imperial occupation. Successive recent
reports have suggested that the unpopularity of the government and
the ‘disrespectful’ behaviour of the occupying troops have had the effect
of creating nostalgia for the time when the Taliban were in power. The
repression leaves people with no option but to back those trying to resist,
especially in a part of the world where the culture of revenge is strong.

When a whole community feels threatened it reinforces solidarity, regardless
of the character or weakness of those who fight back. This does not
just apply to the countryside. The mass protests in Kabul, when civilians
were killed by an American military vehicle, signalled the obvious targets:

Rioters chanted slogans against the United States and President Karzai
and attacked the Parliament building, the offices of media outlets and nongovernmental
organizations, diplomatic residences, brothels, and hotels
and restaurants that purportedly served alcohol. The police, many of whom
disappeared, proved incompetent, and the vulnerability of the government
to mass violence became clear. [18]

As the British and Russians discovered to their cost in the preceding two
centuries, Afghans do not like being occupied. If a second-generation
Taliban is now growing and creating new alliances it is not because
its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is
the only available umbrella for national liberation. Initially, the middlecadre
Taliban who fled across the border in November 2001 and started
low-level guerrilla activity the following year attracted only a trickle of
new recruits from madrasas and refugee camps. From 2004 onwards,
increasing numbers of young Waziris were radicalized by Pakistani
military and police incursions in the tribal areas, as well as devastating
attacks on villages by unmanned us ‘drones’. At the same time, the movement
was starting to win active support from village mullahs in Zabul,
Helmand, Ghazni, Paktika and Kandahar provinces, and then in the
towns. By 2006 there were reports of Kabul mullahs who had previously
supported Karzai’s allies but were now railing against the foreigners and
the government; calls for jihad against the occupiers were heard in the
north-east border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.

The largest pool for new Taliban recruits, according to a well-informed
recent estimate, has been ‘communities antagonized by the local authorities
and security forces’. In Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan, Karzai’s
cronies—district and provincial governors, security bosses, police
chiefs—are quite prepared to tip off us troops against their local rivals,
as well as subjecting the latter to harassment and extortion. In these circumstances,
the Taliban are the only available defence. (According to the
same report, the Taliban themselves have claimed that families driven
into refugee camps by indiscriminate us airpower attacks on their villages
have been their major source of recruits.) By 2006 the movement
was winning the support of traders and businessmen in Kandahar, and
led a mini ‘Tet offensive’ there that year. One reason suggested for their
increasing support in towns is that the new-model Taliban have relaxed
their religious strictures, for males at least—no longer demanding
beards or banning music—and improved their propaganda: producing
cassette tapes and cds of popular singers, and dvds of us and Israeli
atrocities in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine. [19]

The re-emergence of the Taliban cannot therefore simply be blamed
on Islamabad’s failure to police the border, or cut ‘command and control’
links, as the Americans claim. While the isi played a crucial role
in bringing the Taliban to power in 1996 and in the retreat of 2001,
they no longer have the same degree of control over a more diffuse
and widespread movement, for which the occupation itself has been
the main recruiting sergeant. It is a traditional colonial ploy to blame
‘outsiders’ for internal problems: Karzai specializes in this approach. If
anything, the destabilization functions in the other direction: the war
in Afghanistan has created a critical situation in two Pakistani frontier
provinces, and the use of the Pakistan army by Centcom has resulted in
suicide terrorism in Lahore, where the Federal Investigation Agency and
the Naval War College have been targeted by supporters of the Afghan
insurgents. The Pashtun majority in Afghanistan has always had close
links to its fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan. The present border was an imposition
by the British Empire, but it has always remained porous. It is
virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the
mountainous and largely unmarked 1,500-mile frontier that separates
the two countries.

 Older models

The current occupation of Afghanistan naturally recalls colonial
operations in the region, not just to Afghans but to some Western
myth-makers—usually British, but with a few Subcontinental mimics—
who try to draw lessons from the older model; the implication being
that the British were ‘good imperialists’ who have a great deal to teach
the brutish, impatient Americans. The British administrators were, for
the most part, racist to the core, and their self-proclaimed ‘competence’
involved the efficient imposition of social apartheid in every colony
they controlled. They could be equally brutal in Africa, the Middle
East and India. Though a promise of civilizational uplift was required
as ideological justification, then as now, the facts of the colonial legacy
speak for themselves. In 1947, the year the British left India, the overwhelming
majority of midnight’s children were illiterate, and 85 per
cent of the economy was rural. [20]

Not bad intentions or botched initiatives, but the imperial presence itself
was the problem. Kipling is much quoted today by editorialists urging a
bigger Western ‘footprint’ in Afghanistan, but even he was fully aware
of the hatred felt by the Pashtuns for the British, and wrote as much in
one of his last despatches from Peshawar in April 1885 to the Civil and
Military Gazette in Lahore:

Pathans, Afridis, Logas, Kohistanis, Turcomans and a hundred other varieties
of the turbulent Afghan race, are gathered in the vast human menagerie
between the Edwardes Gate and the Ghor Khutri. As an Englishman passes,
they will turn to scowl on him, and in many cases to spit fluently on the
ground after he has passed. One burly, big-paunched ruffian, with shaven
head and a neck creased and dimpled with rolls of fat, is specially zealous in
this religious rite—contenting himself with no perfunctory performance,
but with a whole-souled expectoration, that must be as refreshing to his
comrades as it is disgusting to the European.

One reason among many for the Pashtuns’ historic resentment was the
torching of the famous bazaar in Kabul, a triumph of Mughal architecture.
Ali Mardan Khan, a renowned governor, architect and engineer,
had built the chahr-chatta (four-sided) roofed and arcaded central market
in the 17^th century on the model of those in old Euro-Arabian Muslim
cities—Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Palermo or Córdoba. It was regarded
as unique in the region; nothing on the same scale was built in Lahore
or Delhi. The bazaar was deliberately destroyed in 1842 by General
Pollock’s ‘Army of Retribution’, remembered as amongst the worst killers,
looters and marauders ever to arrive in Afghanistan, a contest in
which competition remains strong. Defeated in a number of cities and
forced to evacuate Kabul, the British punished its citizens by removing
the market from the map. What will remain of Kabul when the current
occupiers finally withdraw is yet to be seen, but its spreading mass of
deeply impoverished squatter settlements suggest that it is set to be one
of the major new capitals of the ‘planet of slums’. [21]

The Western occupation of Afghanistan is now confronted with five
seemingly intractable, interrelated problems. The systemic failures of
its nation-building strategy, the corruption of its local agents, the growing
alienation of large sectors of the population and the strengthening
of armed resistance are all compounded by the distortions wrought by
the opium-heroin industry on the country’s economy. According to un
estimates, narcotics account for 53 per cent of the country’s gross domestic
product, and the poppy fields continue to spread. Some 90 per cent
of the world opium supply emanates from Afghanistan. Since 2003 the
nato mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a reduction in
this lucrative trade. Karzai’s own supporters would rapidly desert if their
activities in this sphere were disrupted, and the amount of state help
needed over many years to boost agriculture and cottage industries and
reduce dependence on poppy farming would require an entirely different
set of priorities. Only a surreal utopian could expect nato countries,
busy privatizing and deregulating their own economies, to embark upon
full-scale national-development projects abroad.

 NATO’s goals

It need hardly be added that the bombardment and occupation of
Afghanistan has been a disastrous—and predictable—failure in capturing
the perpetrators of 9.11. This could only have been the result of
effective police work; not of international war and military occupation.
Everything that has happened in Afghanistan since 2001—not to mention
Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon—has had the opposite effect, as the
West’s own intelligence reports have repeatedly confirmed. According
to the official 9.11 Commission report, Mullah Omar’s initial response
to Washington’s demands that Osama Bin Laden be handed over and
al-Qaeda deprived of a safe haven was ‘not negative’; he himself had
opposed any al-Qaeda attack on us targets. [22] But while the Mullah was
playing for time, the White House closed down negotiations. It required
a swift war of revenge. Afghanistan had been denominated the first port
of call in the ‘global war on terror’, with Iraq already the Administration’s
main target. The shock-and-awe six-week aerial onslaught that followed
was merely a drumroll for the forthcoming intervention in Iraq, with no
military rationale in Afghanistan. Predictably, it only gave al-Qaeda leaders
the chance to vanish into the hills. To portray the invasion as a ‘war of
self-defence’ for nato makes a mockery of international law, which was
perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab
groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust
into the Middle East and Central Eurasia.

Herein lie the reasons for the near-unanimity among Western opinionmakers
that the occupation must not only continue but expand—‘many
billions over many years’. They are to be sought not in the mountain fastnesses
of Afghanistan, but in Washington and Brussels. As the Economist
summarizes, ‘Defeat would be a body blow not only to the Afghans,
but’—and more importantly, of course—‘to the nato alliance’. [23] As ever,
geopolitics prevails over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers.
The basing agreement signed by the us with its appointee in Kabul
in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military
presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity, potentially including nuclear missiles.
That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught
and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of ‘democratization and
good governance’ was made clear by nato’s Secretary-General Jaap de
Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: a permanent
nato presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics,
China, Iran and Pakistan was too good to miss. [24]

More strategically, Afghanistan has become a central theatre for reconstituting,
and extending, the West’s power-political grip on the world
order. It provides, first, an opportunity for the us to shrug off problems
in persuading its allies to play a broader role in Iraq. As Obama
and Clinton have stressed, America and its allies ‘have greater unity of
purpose in Afghanistan. The ultimate outcome of nato’s effort to stabilize
Afghanistan and us leadership of that effort may well affect the
cohesiveness of the alliance and Washington’s ability to shape nato’s
future.’ [25] Beyond this, it is the rise of China that has prompted nato
strategists to propose a vastly expanded role for the Western military
alliance. Once focused on the Euro-Atlantic area, a recent essay in nato
Review suggests, ‘in the 21^st century nato must become an alliance
founded on the Euro-Atlantic area, designed to project systemic stability
beyond its borders’:

The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably
eastward . . . The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive
to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor
embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic
responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they
have built, to lead the way . . . security effectiveness in such a world is
impossible without both legitimacy and capability. [26]

The only way to protect the international system the West has built, the
author continues, is to ‘re-energize’ the transatlantic relationship: ‘There
can be no systemic security without Asian security, and there will be no
Asian security without a strong role for the West therein.’

These ambitions have yet to be realized. In Afghanistan there were angry
street demonstrations against Karzai’s signing of the us bases agreement
—a clear indication, if one was still needed, that nato will have to
take Karzai with them if they withdraw. Uzbekistan responded by asking
the United States to withdraw its base and personnel from their country.
The Russians and Chinese are reported to have protested strongly in
private, and subsequently conducted joint military operations on each
other’s territory for the first time: ‘concern over apparent us plans for
permanent bases in Afghanistan and Central Asia’ was an important
cause of their rapprochement. [27] More limply, Iran responded by increasing
export duties, bringing construction in Herat to a halt. [28]

There are at least two routes out of the Khyber impasse. The first and
worst would be to Balkanize the country. This appears to be the dominant
pattern of imperial hegemony at the moment, but whereas the Kurds in
Iraq and the Kosovars and others in the former Yugoslavia were willing
client-nationalists, the likelihood of Tajiks or Hazaras playing this role
effectively is more remote in Afghanistan. Some us intelligence officers
have been informally discussing the creation of a Pashtun state that
unites the tribes and dissolves the Durand Line, but this would destabilize
Pakistan and Afghanistan to such a degree that the consequences
would be unpredictable. In any event there appear to be no takers in
either country at the moment.

The alternative would require a withdrawal of all us forces, either preceded
or followed by a regional pact to guarantee Afghan stability for the
next ten years. Pakistan, Iran, India, Russia and, possibly, China could
guarantee and support a functioning national government, pledged to
preserve the ethnic and religious diversity of Afghanistan and create a
space in which all its citizens can breathe, think and eat every day. It
would need a serious social and economic plan to rebuild the country
and provide the basic necessities for its people. This would not only be
in the interests of Afghanistan, it would be seen as such by its people—
physically, politically and morally exhausted by decades of war and two
occupations. Violence, arbitrary or deliberate, has been their fate for too
long. They want the nightmare to end and not be replaced with horrors
of a different kind. Religious extremists would get short shrift from the
people if they disrupted an agreed peace and began a jihad to recreate
the Taliban Emirate of Mullah Omar.

The us occupation has not made this task easy. Its predictable failures
have revived the Taliban, and increasingly the Pashtuns are uniting
behind them. But though the Taliban have been entirely conflated with
al-Qaeda in the Western media, most of their supporters are driven by
local concerns; their political evolution would be more likely to parallel
that of Pakistan’s domesticated Islamists if the invaders were to leave. A
nato withdrawal could facilitate a serious peace process. It might also
benefit Pakistan, provided its military leaders abandoned foolish notions
of ‘strategic depth’ and viewed India not as an enemy but as a possible
partner in creating a cohesive regional framework within which many
contentious issues could be resolved. Are Pakistan’s military leaders and
politicians capable of grasping the nettle and moving their country forward?
Will Washington let them? The solution is political, not military.
And it lies in the region, not in Washington or Brussels.