Christian Parenti reports from Afghanistan
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/afghanistan
Chaos and Fear Stalk Afghanistan on 9/11 Anniversary by CHRISTIAN PARENTI
[posted online on September 11, 2006]
Kabul
The fifth anniversary of September 11 finds Afghanistan in a
deepening crisis. Security is deteriorating in most parts of the
country, due to Taliban insurgency and general lawlessness. Economic
development is largely stalled in the south and moving very slowly in
the north. Kabul is mired in corruption and layer upon layer of
dysfunctional bureaucracy. Bribery is so rampant that even sections
of the government have to bribe each other to get simple tasks
accomplished.
Most disturbing is the deteriorating security environment, which was
punctuated by a massive suicide car bomb that ripped into a US convoy
on September 8, a mere 300 yards from the US Embassy and just in
front of the main monument honoring the Mujahadeen leader Ahmed Shah
Masaud, who was killed by Al Qeada two days before the attack on the
World Trade Center in New York. The suicide attack killed two US
soliders, destroying their vehicle and sixteen Afghan civilians.
Dozens more were wounded.
“Now everyone is very sad in Kabul,” said a young man who lives near
where the suicide bomb struck. “Many people were injured. Even my
brother called from Belgium, he was so worried.”
Two days later the Taliban killed the governor of the relatively
stable, eastern province of Paktia with another suicide bomb. The
victim, Governor Abdul Hakim Taniwal, was an Afghan ex-pat, a former
sociologist who gave up a comfortable life in Australia to help
reconstruct his country. His murder was the forty-eighth suicide
bombing this year. Today, at his funeral, another bomb claimed at
least five more lives.
In the week leading up to the 9/11 anniversary several rockets hit
central Kabul and the airport and one NATO solider was killed by a
suicide bomb. At least one other IED was discovered before
detonation. And now the US military has announced that they believe a
“suicide cell” is operating inside the capital–so sealing Kabul’s
four main entrance points might not prevent further attacks.
In the south, British-led NATO forces are engaged in an all-out fight
against Taliban guerrillas, in the grandly named Operation Medusa.
Since early August NATO forces (know locally under the acronym ISAF)
have had twenty-three soliders of various nationalities killed and an
undisclosed number wounded. Six ISAF troops have died in the last
week alone.
Taliban fighters in southern Zabul province interviewed by The Nation
in February explained that their war as a jihad against the
corruption of the Kabul government and what they see as oppressive
foreign troops who do not respect Islam or Pashtun culture.
The British military claims to be super-adroit at handling restive
natives, but many accounts portray the British-led counterinsurgency
in the south as badly botched. On September 9 and 10, NATO forces
used artillery and close air support to kill ninety-four insurgents
one day and ninety-two the next, describing the second battle among
villages and orchards as a “Taliban counter-attack.”
There are reports of civilian casualties filtering from the Operation
Medusa battleground, but follow-up investigation by journalists–
particularly non-Afghan reporters–is impossible as the Taliban are
almost totally hostile to the press.
At a September 10 press briefing, NATO spokesman Mark Laity attempted
to assure journalist that there would be a full investigation into
civilian deaths, while an officer in the south simply affirmed that
the Taliban in the Panjwayi-Zhari area of Kandahar Province “have
suffered significant attrition.”
“They don’t seem to understand that if you kill one person you make
an enemy of the whole family,” said Omar, an increasingly pessimistic
Kabul businessman.
As hostility among the Pashtun tribes of the South grows fiercer,
NATO tactics have escalated to ever more lethal levels.
One British officer, Captain Leo Docherty, a former aide de camp to
the commander of UK forces in Helmand province, was so disgusted by
the war that he quit the British Army last month, calling the
campaign in Afghanistan “grotesquely clumsy” and “a textbook case of
how to screw up a counterinsurgency.” He accused UK and US forces of
bombing and strafing villages.
Such high-tech brutality is no doubt party fueled by NATO’s failure
to fill its original commitments: ISAF’s nearly 20,000 troops are
thinly spread, operating across 85 percent of the country.
Just south of Kabul, in Logar province, residents report that the
Taliban are in control of whole districts; their power is based in
part on local loyalties to the Gulbudin Hekmatyar, a warlord who was
once backed by the CIA but is now with the Taliban, and partly on
their attempts to eradicate corrupt government officials and allow
poppy cultivation–both of which are very popular with poor farmers.
Economically the situation in Afghanistan is little better. Kabul
has, by some estimates, more that doubled in size since 2001 and is
now home to an estimated 4 million people most of whom live in
squalid conditions. There is only about four hours of city power on
most days. Water is also in short supply, most slum dwellers have to
buy it from tanker trucks; in the countryside drought and lack of
infrastructure are withering crops. Many NGOs continue to scale back:
during the May 29 Kabul riots international officers were attacked
and NGO staff (almost all local Afghans) are getting killed on the
roads. These murders rarely make the news.
Several key highway links have been paved and that has improved
commerce and communications. But the road from Kabul to Kandahar,
which is now good, suffered from very bad security.
In the face of all this, NATO member states meeting in Warsaw
acknowledged the need to fulfill their commitments in Afghanistan by
sending more troops–but they did not actually promise to do so.
The sad contradiction of Afghanistan is that many of the individuals
and NGOs that joined the reconstruction effort here were not
supportive of the American-led assault for fear that it would serve
as a stepping-stone to Iraq and quickly devolve into a neocolonial
occupation. But the fall of the Taliban was also seen as
Afghanistan’s last, best chance at avoiding several more decades of
anarchy, privation and civil war. That hope is now fading.