The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians’ First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then, a vehicle that was part of the foreign presence in the country apparently went out of control and ended up killing and injuring a number of the indigenous citizens… Today, as then, that lethal event triggered a response from the citizens that revealed a huge amount of pent-up anger and resentment… (Today, as then, the spokesmen for the foreign presence had previously been saying “all is fine and normal” with the general situation… But the eruption of anger gives the lie to that claim.)
It is far too early to tell how these events in Kabul will play out. The BBC is reporting that,
- At least seven were killed in the shooting and the riots which followed.
About 2,000 people demonstrated in the city centre, with some moving on to attack buildings in the diplomatic quarter.
For over two hours there were bursts of gunfire as hundreds of protesters rampaged through Kabul, burning cars and attacking police checkpoints.
Police and the army – including tanks – moved in to restore law and order and the curfew from 2200 local time (1730 GMT) to 0400 (2330 GMT) was imposed…
But this is Kabul, remember– Afghanistan’s national capital. This is the one place in the country that was supposed to be quite secure for the US-led rebuilding project, even though there has been all kinds of tumult in other Afghan regions. Including in the south, where the Taliban have reportedly been regrouping in battle-groups of as large as 300 men…
Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has a very serious piece in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph. He writes:
- The last thing Tony Blair and President George W. Bush need, at a moment of multiple crises for both of them, is a revamped Taliban taking control of southern Afghanistan – but that is now not impossible to imagine.
Bush and Blair have only themselves to blame, as they fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and allowed the Taliban and al-Qa’eda to fester in Central Asia during the five years that followed 9/11.
Yesterday’s widespread riots in Kabul are indicative of how disillusioned many Afghans feel about the failure of the West to help rebuild their country.
Nato is now stuck with the consequences…
Fighting a full-scale guerrilla war is not what countries such as Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and others enlisted for. The mandate from their governments is reconstruction, not combat.
“Nato will not fail in Afghanistan … the family of nations will expect nothing less than success,” General James Jones, the head of US and Nato forces in Europe, told a recent seminar in Madrid.
Gen Jones is now desperately trying to persuade contributing countries to end the restrictions they impose on their troops, making it impossible for some of them to fight or commanders to run a proper military campaign.
“What is the point of deploying troops who don’t fight,” ask many Afghans. That is why Gen Jones calls these caveats – they now number a staggering 71 – “Nato’s operational cancer”.
Nato’s weaknesses are what worry President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government. The Taliban and al-Qa’eda know this and more. They have closely followed the testy debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to Afghanistan. They count on inflicting a few bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals, and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate.
The Taliban are also testing American resolve. Nato’s deployment is part of Washington’s agenda to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. It is pulling 3,000 troops out this summer and possibly more later.
The Karzai government is angry with Washington, because many Afghans see this as the start of a full American withdrawal.
Despite Bush and Blair claiming to be successfully micromanaging the war on terror, the war is expanding and the region faces increasing chaos…
Al-Qa’eda, now under the operational leadership of the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, has helped reorganise the Taliban, create unlimited sources of funding from the sale of Afghan-grown opium and forged a new alliance linking the Taliban with extremist groups in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Iraq. Al-Qa’eda has facilitated a major exchange of fighters and training between the Taliban and the extremist groups in Iraq.
Iran is spending large sums out of its windfall oil income in buying support among disaffected and disillusioned Afghan warlords. The day America or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, these Afghans will be unleashed on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, opening a new front quite separate from the Taliban insurgency.
In Central Asia, the Western alliance is floundering. America lost its major military base in Central Asia after Uzbekistan kicked American forces out last year. Emboldened, tiny Kyrgyzstan is now demanding that Washington pay it 100 times more for the base it provides for American forces. Russia and China are working on making sure that America and Nato surrender all their remaining toeholds in Central Asia.
All this is a result of America, Britain and others taking their eye off the ball and circumventing the indisputable truth of 9/11: that the centre of global jihadism and the threat it poses the world still lies in this region, not in Iraq…
Rashid concludes by writing:
- The Western alliance can still win in Afghanistan and root out terrorism, but only by means of a serious, aggressive and sustained commitment by its member countries. So far at least, that commitment is still not apparent.
I am not so sure that this is still possible. (Anyway, rebuilding Afghanistan is supposed to be UN commitment, and not just one that is dominated by the “Western alliance.”)
Rashid is glaringly correct, however, to note that the effort to rebuild Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban was dealt a body blow by Bush’s reckless decision to invade Iraq.
The poor, poor Afghans! This is the second time in recent history that the US, having won a significant military victory inside their country, then proceeded to majorly short-change the project of post-conflict reconstruction, thereby allowing it to sink back into warlordism, esclating social-political chaos, and all the miseries attendant on that situation.
The first time that happened was after the US-supported “mujahideen” forced the Soviets to withdraw their army from the country in February 1989… But after that, Bush I, and then Clinton, promptly forgot about Afghanistan and allowed the warlords (who had been Washington’s allies in the earlier anti-Soviet campaign– along with Usama Bin You-know-who) to wreak their havoc on the country’s people…
Then, in November 2001, the US won a second significant military victory in Afghanistan when it toppled the Taliban regime there (with the help of many of those same warlords). And once again, in the aftermath of the military victory, Washington took its eyes off the ball, this time swiveling them toward Baghdad.
What is the problem of the US policymaking class? When will they ever learn that a military victory is worth nothing on its own, unless the “victory” that it allows can be nailed down solidly through a smart and committed policy of social-political reconstruction for as long as it takes, afterwards?
(Actually, they did know that once–back in 1945. But somehow the lessons seemed to get forgotten after that.)
This time, the stakes for Washington, and the world, are enormous. Afghanistan seems to be turning into a powder-keg. The US position in Iraq is a draining and futile quagmire. And in both places, the collapse of US power that seems to be approaching faster each day will have much wider regional repurcussions… (Pakistan, for instance, will not easily escape from the tumult that reigns along its ungoverned borderlands with Afghanistan.)
Those of us US citizens who oppose war and violence need to be very calm as we point out that:
- (1) As the Dalai Lama says, violence always begets violence. The fact that the US has invested so hugely in massive machines of violence for so long, and has used them so broadly in the past five years, has unleashed huge cascades of violence around the world. Some of this violence comes back to hit Americans. But most of it has affected the poorest and most desperate people in the communities involved. We should all be ashamed.
(2) But better than standing around being ashamed, it is time for our country to cease its reliance on violence and to find ways to redirect all that spending, training, and hardware that until now has been poured into the military, and
(3) Meanwhile, nonviolent ways certainly always exist whereby the world’s conflicts and the any threats to the lives and wellbeing of the US citizenry can be addressed and resolved: We need to return to using and strengthening those nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms.
Meantime, let’s all just hope and pray that the people(s) of Afghanistan can find a way to de-escalate the violence that now plagues so many of their communities. If the US military cannot be part of a project that is effective at rebuilding Afghanistan, then it should be withdrawn from the country. There, as in Iraq, the argument that the US military presence is needed in order to “keep the peace” now seems very hollow indeed.