15 - 21 November 2001
Issue No.560
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 15 - 21 November 2001 Issue No.560 |
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The road untravelled
As the murmur of naysayers and sceptics of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan rises to an audible din, international powers are scrambling to settle on a feasible post-Taliban scheme. Nyier Abdou looks at the limited scenarios on offer
It is hard to miss the irony of what political analysts and wary diplomats call "nation building." The only time world powers talk about "nation building" is when they are in the process of "nation breaking." And since coming down is always easier than going up, few governments are keen on the delicate, if not downright mucky business of playing God, the creator -- not simply God, the destroyer.
Dangerous freedom: (left) the Taliban flag is lowered in front of the Interior Ministry in Kabul after Northern Alliance forces took the capital on Tuesday; (right) an Afghan refugee in the town of Quetta, Pakistan (photos: AFP)
More than one month into the US-led bombing campaign in Afghanistan, a plausible list of tangible short-term goals in the expansive but nebulous war against terrorism has yet to emerge. With the fall of Kabul to opposition forces on Tuesday, the need for this is considerable. The United States and Britain have put so much legwork into building as broad a coalition as possible that they may have fallen victim to their own real politik. The alliance has grown pitiably unwieldy, making it nearly impossible to come to any consensus on future action. Keeping abreast of each unlikely ally's price for compliance is a wearisome process and keeping the coalition glued together has become an end in itself. Forging a credible post-Taliban scenario has been relegated to a sideshow, an afterthought.
Initially, a great deal attention was lavished on Afghanistan's various opposition forces, the forgotten former mujahedin brought together under the ill-defined nom de guerre the Northern Alliance (NA). Despite its history of tireless resistance to Taliban rule, however, the NA leadership -- headed by former President Burhanuddin Rabbani and long dominated by the recently slain resistance hero Ahmed Shah Massoud -- does not represent a credible government-in-waiting. The taking of the capital, despite US entreaties, has hardly endeared the NA to the US- led alliance.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, director of the Washington, DC- based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Global Organised Crime Project and a veteran journalist, insists that the Northern Alliance is not a solution in itself. The US "flirted at the beginning of the crisis with the idea of the Northern Alliance as a stand-alone solution," de Borchgrave told Al-Ahram Weekly. "No longer."
"The US is not planning to put the NA in power -- even the NA is not planning on that," says Barnett R Rubin, director of studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation and a prominent expert on Afghanistan. "Everyone knows it is impossible." Many analysts and diplomats are turning to the former king, Mohamed Zahir Shah, as a route to a more legitimate government. The 86-year-old Zahir Shah, who ruled Afghanistan from 1933 to 1973, has lived in exile in Rome since he was ousted by his cousin and former Prime Minister Mohamed Daud.
Though he has been largely removed from Afghan politics since his ouster, the king still holds an esteemed place in the hearts of many Afghans as it was under his rule that Afghanistan came closest to a representative government. Political parties were tolerated by the regime, the country had a relatively free press and there were parliamentary elections, with women holding seats. The so-called Rome peace process, which centres on Zahir Shah and calls for the convening of a traditional loya jirga, or grand council, proposes a wide coalition which subsumes the minorities that make up the NA as well as the powerful Pashtun who populate the Taliban's southern stronghold.
Many question whether a loya jirga could possibly bring to bear a tenable leadership, but most experts emphasise that this is not really the better choice, it is the only one. "The former king has to be a figurehead above all groups. If he becomes a partner of the NA then he is just another faction -- the usual Afghan danger," Rubin told the Weekly. "Also, we should not repeat the mistake of representing only people with guns. That is the problem, not the solution."
"The key is to get in place a legitimate entity or government to which Afghans wishing to do so can [pledge] their allegiance," says S Frederick Starr, chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. "The king and the loya jirga process can play a part in creating such an entity -- but neither can endow it with full legitimacy, which can only be earned through responsible actions." Starr told the Weekly that it was "out of the question" that the king would rule -- in fact, the king himself does not envision a return to power. Starr equally rules out the return of President Rabbani, "even though he and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin have foolishly and irresponsibly proposed this."
The royalists pushing forward the loya jirga have reached a deal with the NA that would arrange for both sides to appoint a 120-man council, which would in turn select some 1,000 tribal leaders to take part in the emergency loya jirga. From this meeting, a transitional head of state would be elected. Zahir Shah's newly formed Supreme Council for the National Unity of Afghanistan will apparently leave room for Taliban defectors, but one wonders why this is supposed to be a selling point. "Pakistan's Musharraf feels he must include 'moderate' Taliban types," CSIS's de Borchgrave told the Weekly. "A moderate Taliban is someone who's run out of ammo."
According to Larry Goodson, author of Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban and a political science professor at AUC from 1994 to 2000, the last loya jirga of consequence was in 1964, when elders were called on to validate Zahir Shah's experiment with a constitutional monarchy. The Communists tried to convene loya jirgas throughout their rule, but, as Goodson told the Weekly, "The loya jirga never decides anything; it merely validates decisions reached among notables, whereas lesser jirgas and shuras do often make decisions. If the US waits for the king and a successful loya jirga, they will be waiting a long time."
Bernt Glatzer, an anthropologist who specialises in the tribal and ethnic structures of Afghanistan and works at the German Foundation for International Development, is also wary of putting too much hope in the loya jirga, particularly if it is too forced and Western-backed. Asked about possible players in a new leadership, Glatzer was frank: "I do not consider any of the known leaders to be fit to head a feasible government. None of the former or present warlords would fit; the Afghans need a 'peace lord' not one of those worn-out figures."
The US and Britain have stressed that they do not intend to leave Afghanistan in the lurch, but they have also readily diverted all questions about rebuilding Afghanistan to the UN. All eyes are burning down on the recently appointed UN envoy for Afghanistan, former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi, who has been working a furious circuit of key players -- from high-pressure negotiations in Islamabad to stops in Tehran and Rome last week. Last Thursday, Brahimi was in Paris for talks with French President Jacques Chirac, who expressed his certainty that a proposed British-French resolution on a post-Taliban government would sail through a Security Council vote scheduled for 15 or 16 November. Chirac said the plan, which calls on the UN to back a transitional administration centred on Zahir Shah, had support from the US and UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan.
The problem with any vision for a post-Taliban Afghanistan is that despite being ravaged by decades of conflict, years of draught and internal displacement, the country does not have the relative luxury of starting from scratch. With the NA swiftly taking key towns in the north this week, it is obvious that they simply could not resist taking Kabul as well -- so fears of a return to the infighting and lawlessness of the civil war cannot be ignored. "The US is in difficulty right now, because it started the bombing without a political plan and made political decisions only later," Rubin told the Weekly.
"Also, the humanitarian situation is very dangerous and they may not have taken that into account fully. Now they are scrambling to find anti-Taliban Pashtuns, and there are a lot of them, but they are looking to join something credible and effective. They don't want to destroy the Taliban to go back to anarchy." Rubin notes that ensuring a stable leadership takes time -- not simply the length of a bombing campaign. "There is a conflict between the military logic and timetable and the political logic and timetable."
Having returned from a recent trip to Washington, Larry Goodson, who is currently an associate professor at Bentley College, in Massachusetts, seemed unimpressed with the scope of US strategy for a post-Taliban Afghanistan. "Based on what I saw in Washington, the US does not have a clear idea of its post-military goals in Afghanistan and does not appear to be pursuing its military goals -- the destruction of Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban leadership -- in an optimal fashion," Goodson told the Weekly. Saying that the US seemed too keen to shift responsibility for groundwork in Afghanistan to the UN, Goodson said all the US appears ready to commit once the Taliban are out of the way is a sizeable cash infusion. "There is a lot of US interest in the loya jirga mechanism and Zahir Shah, but that will take too long to wait on," Goodson said. "Whether it wants to or not, if the US destroys the Taliban soon, then the US will be de facto rulers of Afghanistan, or Afghanistan will be in civil war once again."
US officials have repeatedly claimed that operations could not be going better, but CSIS's de Borchgrave is not so sure. Asked if he thought America had bitten off more than it can chew, he replied: "I fear so. The image of America defending itself against the forces of evil did not last long. It has been replaced in recent days by the image of a bumbling giant bombing a poor defenceless Muslim country."
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