Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

On January 13, 1842 a wounded and battered British military doctor, Dr. William Brydon, riding atop a dying horse arrived at the British garrison in Jalalabad. He was the only survivor of the 16,000 strong British Army that was in full retreat from Kabul. The remaining soldiers had been slaughtered by the Afghanis in the snowy mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad.

The British discovered in 1842 what every other conquering army has come to learn - that Afghanistan is easily taken but never kept. Since the time of Alexander The Great conquering armies have made forays into Afghanistan only to find that it is the graveyard of occupying armies. Nonetheless in the 19th century the British and the Russians competed for control of Afghanistan in what has come to be known as The Great Game. This Game has always been played with the foreign power installing a puppet regime in Afghanistan, which eventually is destroyed by local forces. As The Great Game has been played out the Afghan distaste of foreign occupiers has grown.

The Great Game continued in the 20th Century with the Americans replacing the British as Russia’s adversary after the Second World War. On Christmas day in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime. With that action The Great Game between the United States and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was launched in earnest. Over the next 10 years the Soviets unsuccessfully battled an insurgency, the Afghan Mujahideen, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The Soviet Army lost over 15,000 soldiers in Afghanistan while over a million Afghans lost their lives in the same period. Yet after 10 years of fighting the Soviet Union was unsuccessful in breaking the back of the insurgency. On February 15, 1989 the battered and demoralized Soviet Red Army completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan. The humiliation of the Afghan campaign and the financial strain put upon the Soviet economy by the invasion and occupation played a significant part in the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. The 10-year Soviet occupation also left the economy and society of Afghanistan in tatters.

More than a decade later the United States finds itself as the occupying force in Afghanistan playing The Great Game once again. In response to the attacks of September 11th 2001, on October 7, 2001 the United States launched an aerial bombing campaign in Afghanistan that led to the rapid collapse of the Taliban regime. After the routing of the Taliban the United States installed the government of Hamid Karzai in power. Subsequently an election was held that legitimized the Karzai government.

As in previous occupations of Afghanistan what appeared initially as a routing of the local forces is beginning to appear as anything but that. Over the past few years the seemingly defeated Taliban have regrouped into an ever more potent insurgency. As the Afghan population has soured of the continued foreign occupation the Taliban have regained support as the defenders of Afghanistan. In recent weeks there has been heavy fighting between the American military and the Taliban in the South of Afghanistan. This renewed fighting has led to significant loss of civilian life. With each additional civilian death the United States is rapidly losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan. The inexorable logic of occupation is leading to ever growing resentment of the occupier amongst the local population.

The situation in Afghanistan has become increasingly more volatile. Any act or accident by the United States is now viewed by the Afghans as an act of provocation. In this context the fatal traffic accident in Kabul yesterday involving an American military truck was the spark that was needed to set ablaze Afghan frustration. Yesterday’s riots will undoubtedly be brought under control by the Afghan Government. But by doing so, the Government will inevitably kill or injure Afghan civilians. Any heavy-handed Government tactic will be viewed by the Afghan people with suspicion. The Government will be seen as doing the bidding of the United States. In appealing for calm President Hamid Karzai may have done more harm then good by calling the rioters enemies of Afghanistan:

Karzai, speaking on national television Monday night, condemned "opportunists" for exploiting a simple traffic accident and said people responsible for the violence would be sought and treated severely. "Accidents happen all over the world," he said. "This is not a reason to fight or destroy. Those who have done this are the enemies of Afghanistan." [Emphasis added by me.]

Karzai will be seen more as an American puppet in the aftermath of yesterday’s riots in which Government troops killed up to 20 people. The Washington Post reports on the underlying resentment brought to the fore by the traffic accident:

The riots exposed the bitter resentment that many Afghans harbor toward the U.S.-led military forces that have been stationed here since the Taliban was driven from power. It also reflected the deep ambivalence many Afghan Muslims feel toward the growing Western influence here that includes high fashion and fast-food shops, sprawling aid compounds and even rap music.

The public mood has also been tense since a U.S. airstrike killed at least 16 civilians last week in a village in southern Afghanistan, the scene of heightened fighting this spring. Afghan and U.S. officials blamed Taliban insurgents who had taken shelter in village compounds and then fired at U.S.-led forces.

This is a situation ripe with danger for the United States at a time when it is preoccupied with the worsening civil war in Iraq. The United States and the Karzai Government are in a no win situation. If they allow the rioting and unrest to continue unchecked Kabul and perhaps the rest of the country will become destabilized. On the other hand if the Karzai Government clamps down on the population, as it has begun to do, it will lose any legitimacy it may have and will be seen as a tool of the occupier. Either way the Karzai Government is likely to go the way of other Governments that were installed by occupiers in Afghanistan.

The United States occupation of Afghanistan will come to an end at some time in the future. The only unknowns are whether or not the American military will suffer the fate of previous occupiers and what kind of society the Americans will leave behind in Afghanistan. The Soviets endured 10 years of pinpricks from the Afghan insurgency before the cost of occupation became too great to bear. What will be the breaking point for the United States? The challenge for the United States is to break the cycle of The Great Game and leave behind a functioning Afghan society that does not lead to future interventions and instability. Meeting this challenge requires the United States to be fully engaged not only militarily but also diplomatically. History has shown that foreign militaries have never been able to impose their will on the Afghan people for an extended period of time. If there is a recipe for success in Afghanistan it does not lie in the use of force. With the United States preoccupied in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan promises to slip away toward failure. Urgent attention is required and may not be forthcoming from the Administration of George W Bush. Thus another predictable chapter of The Great Game may be written.

What happens if Abdul Rahman is set free in Afghanistan and is then killed by a fanatical lynch mob? After all, clerics in Afghanistan have threatened to tear him to pieces. It is an entirely convenient outcome for all concerned. The West can say that they pressured the Karzai government to release him; and they would be right. The Karzai government can claim that they reconciled Western values with Afghan tradition and released the man (albeit on a technicality); and they would be right. The Afghan judiciary can say that they wanted to prosecute him but he was found insane; and they would be right. The Afghan clerics would say that justice must be served, and so a mob killing would be justified; and, by their logic, they would be right.

Everyone wins under this scenario except:

• Abdul Rahman (obviously, I don’t need to explain why he loses here)
• Afghanistan because it does not face the kind of hard choice that societies must confront in order to develop socially and politically
• Islam because it does not get to settle once and for all that the date on the calendar is 2006 and not 622
• The rest of us because we all have a stake in protecting basic human rights (codified internationally in the UDHR).

So, we should not embrace this ducking of the issue by Afghanistan or by our leaders. We should resist it. We should demand that the Afghan constitution resolve the conflict in its language between its acceptance of the UDHR and Islamic Sharia law. We wanted a revolution in that part of the world, well, now we’ve got it. This is the moment of Afghanistan’s liberation, not Tora Bora. We have considerable clout with the Karzai government (we pay his bills and provide for his security). It is time for us to demand a return on our investment. It is time for the Karzai government to move the Taliban out of the Afghan judiciary and offer some real protections. If his government falls, so be it. It was and is an impotent government anyway.

The real war against terror was in Afghanistan until we exported it to Iraq. That war still rages for all Afghanis - in the degradation of women, in medieval justice, in the illiteracy, in the ignorance, in the poverty. We must fight this war, now that we are called to wage it. This war is the "long war", to borrow a phrase. It requires bombs and teachers. It requires guns and books. It requires the exposition of one simple idea: that the basic right of human beings is the right to exist. And to exist means to think (tip to Descartes), and to think freely. All else follows: votes, democracy, wealth, pursuit of happiness, etc.

Whether this President and this Government has the political capital (after the humiliation in Iraq), the political will, and the requisite foresight and competence to carry out this long war remains in great doubt. Past experience suggests that the Administration is not capable of confronting this complex challenge. It pays lip service to words like "freedom" and "liberty" without understanding what lies behind these ideals. This Administration started the process in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from official power. Now it must follow through by giving the Afghan people the tools needed to remove the Taliban from their lives. Anything less will be another defeat for the United States in this war.

What can we do as citizens? The easy answer is that we should make our leaders accountable to us. We should remind our leaders who the enemy is and who attacked us. We should remind them that those who attacked us are still out there and their mystique grows with the passing of each humiliating day in Iraq for the United States. Our leaders must find a way to contain the damage we have done to Iraq, to ourselves and to our ability to project moral and military power. They must find a way to restore the image of the United States in the world - with each passing day and each defiant swagger of the likes of John Bolton this task is that much harder. Our leaders must restore the international alliances and organizations that we have left in tatters. Our leaders must commit to doing all of these things, or we must send them off to early retirement.

Make no mistake, there is a battle going on not only for the soul of Islam but also for the soul of the United States. Where we stand in this fight will determine what kind of planet we leave our children. We must decide whether we choose a clash of civilizations or a historic leap forward in our understanding of one another. The stakes are nothing less than that.