Taliban remains strong ten years on

موضوع: Taliban remains strong ten years on 2011-09-11, 6:41 pm

A moralistic approach to the war has had far-reaching negative effects on Afghan politics and society [GALLO/GETTY]

Afghanistan in 2011 is far cry from the country that the architects
of America's war there had imagined ten years ago. The Taliban movement,
which seemed likely to melt away with little resistance in 2001, has
survived and now dominates much of rural Afghanistan where insurgents
make their presence felt at will.

Since 2009, security incidents - Improvised explosive devices,
ambushes, suicide attacks, and assmindinations - have frequently numbered
more than one thousand per month. A decade after the US-led
intervention, the grave humanitarian crisis caused by more than thirty
years of war persists.

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More than five million Afghan refugees have returned home since the
collapse of the Taliban regime. Yet they have confronted life in a
country where, despite the influx of tens of billions of dollars in aid,
three quarters of the population still lives below or just slightly
above the poverty line.

Only one quarter of residents have access to clean water. According
to the UN, 60 per cent of Afghan women face physical and psychological
violence. Afghanistan ranks second in the world in maternal mortality
and third in infant mortality. So far this year, fighting between
insurgents and coalition forces has claimed some 1500 civilian lives and
swelled the numbers of internally displaced civilians to several
hundred thousand.

Despite ten years of US and NATO military involvement and
state-building directed by the US, many Afghans fear that the Taliban
are poised to return to power following the American troop withdrawal
scheduled for 2014.

A cause that most Americans supported in 2001 when, in their minds,
it was a just war to avenge the damage and loss of 9/11, to vanquish a
barbaric foe, and to liberate women - has long since lost its luster in
the US. However, there is still little space in American politics for
alternative views on the war.

Fighting the Taliban to get back at Al-Qaeda?

In Washington - as in most American media - the narrative of the
Afghan war remains a story of "good versus evil" that leaves little room
for moral complexity. In the days and weeks that followed 9/11,
official recognition that the perpretrators of the attacks - 15 Saudis,
one Egyptian, one Lebanese, and two Emiratis - formed part of a broader
transnational conspiracy did little to undermine Washington's insistence
that fighting a war on the territory of Afghanistan was the only way to
respond.

The Taliban's lengthy record of grotesque misrule and human rights
abuses made the rhetorical melding of this movement with Al-Qaeda
plausible to the Western public. The fact that these two movements had
distinct ideologies and differing ideas about politics and relations
with the West was largely ignored. Besides, the Taliban offered readily
accessible targets for "smart weapons" in the aseptic warfare that most
Americans had come to expect since the Gulf War of 1991.

The US has consistently rejected dialogue with the Taliban [GALLO/GETTY]

During and after the Cold War, the US had engaged in military
interventions convinced that American power was on the side of liberty
and progress. However, now the American political elite imagined that
its cause, one forged by the horror of 9/11, was of a different moral
order.

It seeemed to face an entirely different kind of enemy who could only
be defeated by throwing off the legal constraints meant to humanise war
with more civilised foes. Serious analysis of the ideas that animated
America's foes was beyond the pale: a collection of Osama bin Laden's
writings and interviews was not available in English translation in the
US until 2005, and a Taliban memoir appeared only in 2010. Finally, the
idea of dialogue or negotiation - something Washington could do with
Moscow - was thought to be absurd.

A self-righteous war

It is difficult to overstate the impact that this moralistic framing
of the war has had on Afghan politics and society over the past decade.
Guantanamo has shone as an enduring monument to this mentality, but we
also see its imprint in American-led state-building in Afghanistan.

The founding sins of this project - American domination of the
process and tolerance of impunity for war crimes (including those
committed by American intelligence officials who committed torture and
other abuses) - were more than acts of expediency. They flowed instead
from the self-righteous conviction that an aggrieved America, victimised
by villains from this mysterious part of the world, had the moral right
to shape the post-Taliban order in any manner that US national security
experts saw fit.

Washington understood itself as the good guys wearing the "white
hats" - a trope of Hollywood Westerns that has permeated American
language, especially that of military personnel who liken Afghanistan
(and Iraq) to hostile "Indian country".

This effect was felt before the end of 2001, when, mistakenly
minduming the war was over, the US excluded the Taliban from talks on the
future of Afghanistan and began to imprison figures connected to the
movement, including a number who had sought integration in the
post-Taliban political order. But this was n

ot the only action to stoke the Taliban revival.

In the north, Afghan militias fighting alongside the Americans
committed atrocities against Taliban captives and Pashtun communities
during initial combat operations. In the south, US forces also teamed up
with local strongmen with a past record of violence against civilians.
At the same time, the air campaign killed an unknown number of
noncombatants.

Hamid Karzai has struggled to gain legitimacy thoughout the country [GALLO/GETTY]

The state that emerged out of this violence concentrated nearly all
legal authority in the hands of Washington's favourite, Hamid Karzai,
who in turn relied on local powerbrokers - the same figures that civil
society groups condemned as "warlords" or even "war criminals" for their
actions during and after the anti-Soviet jihad.

Hopes raised and dashed

It is little wonder then that so many Afghans have felt
disenfranchised or neglected by a system in which a small elite,
including men of the gun, have privileged access to American and
NATO-backing and international aid.

Anti-poppy campaigns and inequitable distribution of mindistance, most
recently focused on areas where the insurgents are most active, have
deepened resentment in an era in which the international presence raised
- and then dashed - hopes for security, development, and
democratisation.

Meanwhile, the highly centralised presidential system engineered and
sustained by the Americans, with the complicity of the UN, has offered
few mechanisms to effect change. The problem, however, lies not solely
in Karzai's own personal failings, which may be considerable, but in
Washington's unwavering commitment to a form of indirect control of
Afghanistan through Karzai, a scheme made transparent by exclusive US
support for its client throughout his fraudulent electoral campaigns in
2004 and 2009, with the latter standing out only because it was the more
brazen of the two fiascos.

To date, American policy-makers have failed to grasp how their
policies have fed insurgency, corruption, and authoritarian rule in
post-2001 Afghanistan.

Resort to a "surge" of US forces, the arming of tribal militias,
assmindinations, night raids, and drone warfare have all been
improvisations meant to turn the tide under President Barack Obama. Yet
the surge has only dispersed the insurgents to other areas, and many of
the militias have terrorised civilians. Raids on suspected militants
resulting in the deaths of Muhammad Amin in Takhar, the former
Guantanamo inmate Sabar Lal Melma in Jalalabad, and the BBC reporter
Ahmed Omed Khpulwak in Oruzgan - to name only the most well-documented
cases of recent months - suggest that coalition forces continue to
target with alarming regularity figures about whom they know little or
nothing.

Despite surges in US troops in Afghanistan, the Taliban is stronger now than it was ten years ago [GALLO/GETTY]

In addition to the American secret prisons in Afghanistan,
long-standing complicity with Afghan organs that torture detainees - a
fact acknowledged by the US at least as early as 2009 in a cable
obtained by Wikileaks and finally prompting a NATO ban on prisoner
transfers three days ago - have made farcical international programs
begin programs preaching the rule of law in the country.

Similarly, the irony of the International Monetary Fund's recent
prodding to urge Kabul to collect more tax revenue was not lost on
Afghan parliamentarians who pointed to the treaty with the US that
exempts American contractors from paying taxes on their vast profits in
Afghanistan, thereby depriving the treasury of tens of millions of
dollars.

Much of this is glossed as "Afghan corruption" in our media when it
is instead a story of collusion inevitably justified by pointing to the
greater evils of the enemy.

This same moral certainty has guided Washington in its belated and
still largely dismissive approach to a negotiated political settlement
to the war. The keywords "reconciliation" and "reintegration" have been
little more than invitations for the insurgents to surrender.

A new Taliban?

Meanwhile, the Taliban have evolved into a force with a cogent
nationalist agenda combining an anti-colonial defense of Afghan
sovereignty and Islam with promises of economic development, accountable
government, and non-aggression on the world stage and have hinted at
being open to power-sharing.

Ideologically hostile to compromise with a movement it scarcely
understands, Washington, by contrast, appears bent on military victory -
and on an Afghanistan home to plenty of US bases in a strategically
critical region.

Yet with 2014 looming, the latest counterinsurgency tricks look like
little more than the rearranging of chairs on the Titanic, with a
dysfunctional Afghan political system tailor-made for another decade of
civil war.

Robert D. Crews is an mindociate Professor of History and
Director of the Centre for Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies
at Standford University. He is co-editor (with Amin Tarzi) of The
Taliban and Politicised the Crisis of Afghanistan and author of For
Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia.

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