The Khyber Impasse: The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan
February 27, 2007
By TARIQ ALI
It is Year 6 of the UN-backed NATO occupation of Afghanistan, a joint US/EU mission. On 26 February there was an attempted assassination of Dick Cheney by Taliban suicide bombers while he was visiting the ‘secure’ US air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base during an earlier conflict). Two US soldiers and a mercenary (‘contractor’) died in the attack, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have concentrated the US Vice-President’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. In 2006 the casualty rates rose substantially and NATO troops lost forty-six soldiers in clashes with the Islamic resistance or shot-down helicopters.
The insurgents now control at least twenty districts in the Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan provinces where NATO troops have replaced US soldiers. And it is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. The situation is out of control. At the beginning of this war Mrs Bush and Mrs Blair appeared on numerous TV and radio shows claiming that the aim of the war was to liberate Afghan women. Try repeating that today and the women will spit in your face.
Who is responsible for this disaster? Why is the country still subjugated? What are Washington’s strategic goals in the region? What is the function of NATO? And how long can any country remain occupied against the will of a majority of its people?
Few tears were shed in Afghanistan and elsewhere when the Taliban fell, the hopes aroused by Western demagogy did not last too long. It soon became clear that the new transplanted elite would cream off a bulk of the foreign aid and create its own criminal networks of graft and patronage. The people suffered. A mud cottage with a thatched roof to house a family of homeless refugees costs fewer than five thousand dollars. How many have been built? Hardly any. There are reports each year of hundreds of shelter-less Afghans freezing to death each winter.
Instead a quick-fix election was organised at high cost by Western PR firms and essentially for the benefit of Western public opinion. The results failed to bolster support for NATO inside the country. Hamid Karzai the puppet President, symbolised his own isolation and instinct for self-preservation by refusing to be guarded by a security detail from his own ethnic Pashtun base. He wanted tough, Terminator look-alike US marines and was granted them.
Might Afghanistan been made more secure by a limited Marshall-Plan style intervention? It is, of course, possible that the construction of free schools and hospitals, subsidised homes for the poor and the rebuilding of the social infrastructure that was destroyed after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 could have stabilised the country. It would also have needed state help to agriculture and cottage industries to reduce the dependence on poppy farming. 90 percent of the world’s opium production is based in Afghanistan. UN estimates suggest that heroin accounts for 52 percent of the impoverished country’s gross domestic product and the opium sector of agriculture continues to grow apace. All this would have required a strong state and a different world order. Only a slightly crazed utopian could have expected NATO countries, busy privatising and deregulating their own countries, to embark on enlightened social experiments abroad.
And so elite corruption grew like an untreated tumour. Western funds designed to aid some reconstruction were siphoned off to build fancy homes for their native enforcers.. In Year 2 of the Occupation there was a gigantic housing scandal. Cabinet ministers awarded themselves and favoured cronies prime real estate in Kabul where land prices reached a high point after the Occupation since the occupiers and their camp followers had to live in the style to which they had become accustomed. Karzai’s colleagues built their large villas, protected by NATO troops and in full view of the poor.
Add to this that Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmad Wali Karzai, has become one of the largest drug barons in the country. At a recent meeting with Pakistan’s President, when Karzai was bleating on about Pakistan’s inability to stop cross-border smuggling, General Musharraf suggested that perhaps Karzai should set an example by bringing his sibling under control.
While economic conditions failed to improve, NATO military strikes often targeted innocent civilians leading to violent anti-American protests in the Afghan capital last year. 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 entire region as a fully-fledged imperial occupation. The Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation. As the British and Russians discovered to their cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never liked being occupied.
There is no way NATO can win this war now. Sending more troops will lead to more deaths. And full-scale battles will destabilise neighbouring Pakistan. Musharraf has already taken the rap for an air raid on a Muslim school in Pakistan. Dozens of children were killed and the Islamists in Pakistan organised mass street protests. Insiders suggest that the ‘pre-emptive’ raid was, in fact, carried out by US war planes who were supposedly targeting a terrorist base, but the Pakistan government thought it better they took the responsibility to avoid an explosion of anti-American anger.
NATO’s failure cannot be blamed on the Pakistani government. If anything, the war in Afghanistan has created a critical situation in two Pakistani provinces. The Pashtun majority in Afghanistan has always had close links to its fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan. The border was an imposition by the British Empire and it has always been porous. Attired in Pashtun clothes I crossed it myself in 1973 without any restrictions. It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked 2500 kilometre border that separates the two countries. The solution is political, not military.
Washington’s strategic aims in Afghanistan appear to be non-existent unless they need the conflict to discipline European allies who betrayed them on Iraq. True, the al-Qaeda leaders are still at large, but their capture will be the result of effective police work, not war and occupation. What will be the result of a NATO withdrawal? Here Iran, Pakistan and the Central Asian states will be vital in guaranteeing a confederal constitution that respects ethnic and religious diversity. The NATO occupation has not made this task easy. Its failure has revived the Taliban and increasingly the Pashtuns are uniting behind it.
The lesson here, as in Iraq, is a basic one. It is much better for regime-change to come from below even if this means a long wait as in South Africa, Indonesia or Chile. Occupations disrupt the possibilities of organic change and create a much bigger mess than existed before. Afghanistan is but one example.
Tariq Ali’s new book, Pirates of the Caribbean, is published by Verso. He can be reached at: tariq.ali3@btinternet.com
This article originally appeared in Counterpunch.
Via New Socialist
More excellent analysis at James Laxer's Blog
(More...)
Commenting on the court’s ruling, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia said he was inspired by the court’s deep sense of history and commitment to the global community. 
Time flies, wondered gossip corridor. The saga that was unfolding before the nation when Tamrat Layne, once second in charge in the camp of the Revolutionary Democrats, was confessing guilt on a live televised parliamentary showdown feels like it was just happened couple of years ago. 
(Reuters) - A Sudanese official named as a possible Darfur war criminal said he drew inspiration from the example of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at his execution in Baghdad in December.
ETP - Index on Censorship annually presents its award to courageous journalists, writers, lawyers, campaigners, filmmakers and whistleblowers from around the world who have made a significant contribution to free expression over the past year.
(SUDAN) A displaced Sudanese girl carries her sister at the Otach camp in Nyala, Feb. 22. The International Criminal Court's prosecutor Today named a former Sudanese junior minister and a militia leader as suspects in war crimes and crimes against humanity in the country's Darfur region (More on this below) 
the aftermath of Ethiopia’s landmark May 2005 parliamentary elections laid bare the deeply entrenched patterns of political repression, human-rights abuse and impunity that characterise the day-to-day reality of governance in much of the country.
TEL AVIV, 27 February 2007 (IRIN) - Thousands of Ethiopian former Jews have been waiting more than 10 years in disease-ridden camps in Ethiopia for the Israeli government to take them to Israel, NGOs say. 
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Journalists here don't criticize the government much anymore, perhaps because doing so has landed at least 15 of them in prison on treason charges.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) - Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed on Monday said a deployment of Ugandan troops to Somalia, the first members of an 8,000-strong African Union peacekeeping force, should begin this week. 
DAKAR, Senegal - The president of one of Africa’s most stable democracies sought another five-year term Sunday, jostling with 14 contenders in a race that may hinge on the votes of young people hungry for jobs. 
In a list of the countries with the greatest percentage of overweight people, Nauru tops a list with an alarming 94.5% of its adult population (ages 15+) classified as such, based on the most recent estimates by the World Health Organization (WHO).
A picture released 17 January 2007 by the US Air Force (USAF) shows Ethiopians from the nearby village of Bilate sitting near an Air Force C-130 Hercules deployed to Ethiopia. The US military remained silent on a press report Friday that US ground troops used Ethiopian bases to fight Al-Qaeda in Somalia, but said it would help regional allies fight terrorists. Bereket Simon denied the report by the New York times calling it a fabrication.(AFP/USAF-HO/File) 
These days in Addis Ababa, a have-and-have-not capital in which elegant piazzas abut ramshackle slums, there's a climate of thickening fear and suspicion. 
23 February (IRIN) - Standing at the front of her classroom, Mulu Melka reads out of her English book in a shy voice like any other 13-year-old schoolgirl; betraying nothing of the fact that twice within two years, she has been abducted and forced into marriage. 
One of the earliest Europeans to see the churches of Lalibela, Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares (1465 - 1540) - astounded by their beauty, describes what he had seen in considerable detail and ends by saying , "I weary of writing more about these buildings, because it seems to me that I shall not be believed if I write more ... I swear by God, in Whose power I am, that all I have written is the truth". Now, these magnificent churches are in danger of collapse, 
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia | Kumbe Seboka, nine months pregnant, sat quietly in the hospital parking lot. She clutched her medical information card in one hand and cradled her swollen belly with the other, as if to keep her unborn child from escaping.
