letting the Afghans twist in the wind... again.

Bushed!
Osama bin Laden is still at large and Afghanistan is a mess -- so why is the
president in a hurry to take his anti-terror campaign elsewhere?

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By David Talbot



Feb. 26, 2002  |  The Bush cheering squad that is still applauding his
prosecution of the war in Afghanistan should hold off on the victory
parades. Recent news reports are now confirming that Osama bin Laden
(remember him, the demonic mastermind behind Sept. 11 whom the president
once labeled his No. 1 target?) and most of his top lieutenants are alive
and well, as is the Taliban's one-eyed despot, Mullah Omar, and his top
deputy. While the president searches for evildoers in other far-flung
corners of the globe, the man responsible for more American deaths than
anyone in Baghdad, Tehran or Pyongyang is merrily sending out e-mails to
friends and supporters, including heartfelt condolences to the family of a
deceased Afghan cleric. As the administration was forced to acknowledge last
week, only one senior al-Qaida official has been killed or captured --
Muhammad Atef, the terror network's top military strategist. And the FBI has
not even removed his name from its list of most wanted terrorists because
his death remains unconfirmed.

Apparently frustrated by its inability to track down the terrorist leaders,
the Bush team has begun to downplay their significance. The president once
told the world that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." But nowadays he
never even mentions the holy warrior with a lust for American blood -- and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has begun telling the press that bin Laden
and his loathsome circle are not that important in the overall scheme of
America's anti-terror war. Try selling that one to New York City
firefighters -- or the rest of the American public, for that matter.

At least Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of the Afghanistan campaign, had
the decency to concede his mission remains glaringly incomplete. Testifying
before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month, Franks nodded
in agreement when Sen. Jim Bunning bluntly told him, "I'm not pleased, and I
don't think any Americans are pleased that we haven't done a better job on
al-Qaida." The Pentagon strategy of relying on Afghan warlords and heavy
American bombing to secure the Tora Bora region where al-Qaida leaders were
holed up, now seems an undeniable blunder. It might have minimized American
casualties -- more journalists than GIs have died as a result of enemy fire
-- but it failed to stop bin Laden and his band from melting away, probably
across the poorly guarded Pakistan border. One military analyst quoted in
last week's Boston Globe called the bombing-centered strategy "shooting a
hornet's nest with a shotgun."

Without the head of bin Laden (and of key deputies like the doctor of death,
Egyptian surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri), the Bush war in Afghanistan is looking
more and more like Gulf War II, a replay of his father's half-victory
against Saddam Hussein, which left the dangerous dictator in power. The
analogy is not exact: Bin Laden does not rule a country, and his terror
network may have received a far more damaging blow than Saddam received.
And, of course, luck may fall our way one of these days -- the $25 million
bounty on bin Laden's turbaned head might finally prompt a local fortune
hunter to ambush the world's most wanted terrorist. But the Bush
administration's apparent haste to move on to other quarry, like North
Korea's hermit tyrant or the obscure band of thugs marauding on a distant
Philippines island, is not reassuring.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan -- the country we were aiming to rescue by
eliminating the Taliban and its terrorist backers -- is a mess. According to
a classified CIA report made public last week, the country is not exactly on
the brink of civil war, but it's close. Warlords and other assorted thugs
control the entire country outside the capital city of Kabul -- and even
there the popular British peacekeepers have been fired upon and civil order
is still shaky. Reports in the press -- including those from Salon's war
correspondent Phillip Robertson -- paint a picture of a country whose
valiant efforts toward peace and justice are widely frustrated by what its
decent but beleaguered interim leader Hamid Karzai calls "the culture of the
knife and the gun." Crime is rampant, even in Kabul and its surrounding
villages, which are patrolled by 4,000 soldiers from Britain and other
countries. Even relief workers have been kidnapped and killed. Last week,
Dallas Morning News correspondent Gregg Jones filed a discouraging report
about life in the Kabul area, where Northern Alliance "liberators" have
reverted to form and are terrorizing the local populace, killing and robbing
and preying on young women. "Many of the same Northern Alliance soldiers who
were here before the Taliban are here again, and they took many girls away
before," a young medical student named Nasima Makhail told Jones, explaining
why she still covered herself in public. "Under the burqa we feel safer."
(Those warlords who prefer boys are also back to their pederastic ways,
according to another story in last week's New York Times.)

And outside Kabul, law and order is practically nonexistent, as Salon's
Robertson documented when he took his life in his hands by traveling by car
from Kabul to Kandahar, a route preyed on by heavily armed teenagers and
highwaymen on motorcycles. When not worrying about bandits and warlords, the
people who live in the Afghan countryside must contend with malnutrition and
disease. And the drug business is back in full force, with farmers once
again planting fields of opium poppies, even though Karzai has demanded it
stop. 

Despite Karzai's tireless efforts, government in Afghanistan remains a pipe
dream. His own cabinet has been torn by sectarian violence, with assassins
from one faction throwing his aviation minister from a plane and stabbing
him to death on the tarmac two weeks ago. Government agencies, which have so
far received just a sliver of the foreign aid promised them, cannot pay
their own staffs. And with less military clout than a highway brigand,
Karzai has no power to enforce his government's will. "Basically, Karzai is
a hostage in his own palace," a Kabul businessman told Jones. "He doesn't
have an army, and if you don't have an army in Afghanistan, you don't have
power." 

As Rumsfeld has acknowledged, "It's not a pretty picture." And
administration officials are making the right noises about helping set it
straight. They're telling the press that this Bush won't abandon
Afghanistan, the way the first one did after the Soviet defeat there in
1989. They won't allow Afghanistan to slide into chaos and once again become
a breeding ground for terrorism. But at the same time, Rumsfeld and his
lieutenants are declaring they're dead set against "nation-building" in the
ravaged country and "mission creep." The Pentagon has offered to help
Afghanistan build its own military -- but that could take more than a year,
and in the meantime, the country is at the mercy of its most savage forces.

The rock-jawed defense secretary who makes conservative pundits go weak in
the knees won't even flex his muscles on behalf of the international
peackeeping force. Karzai has pleaded with Washington to help expand the
force so it can bring peace to more than Kabul, but Rumsfeld has told him,
sorry, the bugles in the war on terror are calling America's armed forces
elsewhere -- and besides, we don't want to get our hands dirty with the
messy work of peace enforcement. We just do the glamorous opening salvos --
our allies can clean up behind us. But abandoning Afghanistan would be
inexcusable, for both practical and moral reasons. Practically, if we don't
put Afghanistan on the road to recovery -- and yes, that means
nation-building -- it will collapse into terror-friendly anarchy. And
morally, we owe something to the blameless Afghan people: After all, we just
bombed their country. Yes, it was necessary and yes, we rid them of their
tyrants, but in the process we created more rubble and misery in a country
that has seen far too much of both.

Speaking of Rumsfeld, just what is the secret of this man's appeal? I can
understand why some conservatives, with their deep need for strong father
figures, get all gooey over his man-of-few-words Pentagon briefings. But why
is the so-called liberal press so enamored of him? Are they grateful that a
Washington authority figure "respects" them enough to tell them he's not
going to tell them the truth? Are they relieved that an administration
presided over by a goofy and inexperienced leader -- someone who still seems
weirdly young at age 55 -- has a grown-up at home? Where was the blast of
criticism from the media that should have immediately followed Rumsfeld's
outrageous refusal last week to apologize for the screwed-up U.S. raid that
killed at least 16 anti-Taliban fighters? Apparently apologies are for wimps
like Clinton. This is precisely the kind of attitude that has so endeared
our country to the rest of the world in recent weeks.

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran yet another story about our
European allies "seething" over America's "we are the champions of the
world" act. After Sept. 11, Europe rallied to the American cause -- the
attacks gave President Bush "the wind of virtue," in the Times' words. But
this international solidarity has now disappeared, gone with the winds of
Bush administration arrogance.

The Europeans aren't the only ones feeling royally had by the White House
these days. There are many of us at home who fully supported massive
military retaliation against bin Laden and his terror apparatus. We still
do. But as Chris Matthews astutely commented on Saturday's "Hardball," the
war against bin Laden -- what Matthews calls "the firefighters' war" -- has
been "hijacked" by neoconservatives with their own agenda. Somewhere around
Tora Bora, Bush took a wrong turn and ended up on the road to Tehran and God
knows where else. What is this neoconservative agenda? Matthews has
suggested it's related to this lobby's support for Israel. But it's arguable
whether putting aside bin Laden in favor of chasing evil around the world
serves Israel's interests. And it certainly doesn't serve America's. (Talk
about mission creep!)

On Sept. 11 the smug, amoral Saudi princeling named Osama bin Laden
escalated his war on America. And with his galling air of superiority, bin
Laden keeps promising to see this war through to its conclusion.
Unfortunately, our own well-born leader lacks bin Laden's sense of focus.
Bush's mission has struck off hither and yon and is in danger of losing not
only international support but its very meaning. "Those who've escaped [the
U.S. military] and are in Pakistan or Iran say al-Qaida and the Taliban are
in safe places and preparing a counteroffensive," a Saudi sympathizer of bin
Laden gloated in the Financial Times last week. "This tells supporters that
the U.S. is living a fake triumph." If the United States is to win a real
victory, it must single-mindedly track down the bin Laden cabal and make
sure Afghanistan never again becomes a garden for their type of pestilence.



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About the writer
David Talbot is Salon's founder and editor in chief.



Can warlords make peace in Afghanistan?
Donald Rumsfeld wants the U.S. to stay out of peacekeeping and build a
national army instead. The problem is that first you need a nation.

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By Phillip Robertson



Feb. 26, 2002  |  The U.S. should have gotten an early clue about how hard
it would be to win the war in Afghanistan -- or even to define winning -- on
the bright morning of Nov. 26, less than an hour after the city of Kunduz
fell to the Northern Alliance. Instead of celebrating that important
victory, rival Alliance factions began firing rockets and automatic rifles
at each other in a fight over the spoils of war. A Northern Alliance
fighter, seeing everyone in the main square start to panic at the violent
chaos, made a point of shouting at me, "It's happy shooting. They are happy.
Happy." 

He said the last word in a particularly manic way, delivering it like a
tennis ball aimed at my head. I told him that they didn't look very happy,
since they were, after all, shooting at each other.

Moments later, the center of Kunduz was empty of everyone except gunmen.

The fighter's absurd statement was a valiant if unconvincing attempt to spin
the factional fighting that gripped Kunduz that Monday morning, one of the
first breakdowns of an embryonic Afghan civil order, and a harbinger of
worse times to come. In fact, a larger-scale version of Kunduz that morning
is exactly what the Bush administration and the international peacekeeping
coalition are dealing with today. Since the rout of the Taliban government,
there have been fierce outbreaks of violence between warlords, harassment of
ethnic minorities and rampant banditry, as well as evidence that both Iran
and Pakistan continue to exercise their influence in the politics of
Afghanistan, which has been the world's boxing ring for the past quarter
century. Demarcated by land mines and surrounded by lunatics, Afghanistan
will know stability only if the U.S. makes an aggressive and not-at-all
ambivalent commitment to building it.

And yet the U.S. seems unwilling to make that commitment. A Feb. 20 New York
Times story referenced a classified CIA report warning of further chaos and
fighting between warlords if ethnic tensions are not reduced. That's a
straightforward observation, but exactly how to accomplish this task has
apparently split the administration into two camps. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, articulating the Pentagon's hands-off view, believes that
the U.S. should back the creation of a national army for Afghanistan and
avoid costly peacekeeping missions.

"Why put all the time and money and effort in that?" Rumsfeld said,
referring to a State Department plan to increase the number of peacekeepers
and extend their reach to cities beyond Kabul. "Why not put it into helping
them develop a national army so that they can look out for themselves over
time?" 

Rumsfeld's plan has a familiar, common-sense ring to it, like a speech given
by a stern father to a no-good kid when it's time for him to get a job. It
will also lead to disaster.

Although a national army is crucial for Afghanistan's long-term security,
such an institution will be years in the making. To form a national army,
after all, you need a nation, and the truth is that there isn't enough
nation yet in the inchoate chaos known as Afghanistan to develop, control or
maintain an army. Afghanistan is a patchwork of tribes and ethnicities,
divided and distrustful, each with their own warlord patron who claims to be
the only defense against hostile forces. Major warlords control almost every
large city and its surrounding provinces -- Gul Aga Shirzai, a Pashtun,
controls Kandahar; Ismail Khan, a Tajik, has Herat; and Abdul Rashid Dostum,
an Uzbek trained by the Soviets, is the boss of Mazar-e-Sharif -- and in
this feudal system, each man has his own private gravitational field, a
fuzzy security region that extends in direct proportion to his military
influence, outside of which is lawlessness and banditry.

Here's a snapshot of what happens when warlords cross each other in the new
regime. I'd been in Kandahar only one day when my friend Amanullah Khan
stopped by with interesting news. "Something's happening," he said. "Gul Aga
Shirzai and Ismail Khan are going to war. Herat and Kandahar will start
fighting soon." Reports that fighters loyal to Ismail Khan, an ethnic Tajik,
had been abusing Pashtuns had been filtering down to the Kandaharis, and
they were outraged. It was Jan. 29, five days after Gul Aga had addressed a
crowd of thousands in Kandahar, saying that he would wait and see what the
Karzai government instructed him to do about Khan's mistreatment of
Pashtuns, saying that he preferred talking to fighting. But now everyone I
spoke to was expecting bloodshed. Ismail Khan was rumored to have moved his
troops south from Herat into a province controlled by Gul Aga, and in
response, Gul Aga had moved his forces north and the rival factions were
facing each other, ready to go at any moment. Men gathering to watch Indian
television at a teahouse that evening were talking excitedly about the
prospect of war. 

Then, just as soon as it came up, the situation resolved itself. Frantic
calls were made. Beards were stroked, and the problem suddenly vanished.
What caused the almost-battle, of course, did not go away. Violent reprisals
against Pashtuns were not limited to Herat. In the north near Kunduz, Uzbeks
under Dostum's control had been beating and robbing Pashtuns in the guise of
disarmament, and the Kandaharis knew about that as well. Future warlord
clashes are almost inevitable.

And at least a few of the warlords have powerful allies. Ismail Khan, for
instance, is not just your average recalcitrant Afghan gunman; Iran is
covertly supplying his men with thousands of brand-new Egyptian AK-47s, in a
strategy to keep him as their proxy warlord and possibly prevent the Karzai
government from unifying the country. In Afghanistan's recent past, it is
this proxy effect that has fueled ethnic tensions and kept the country in a
state of perpetual civil war. When news of Iran's military aid to Khan made
its way to the United States, the State Department warned Iran to steer
clear of Afghan affairs and refrain from undermining the current regime.
Journalists who asked to visit the bases where Khan's fighters were training
under the guise of Iranian advisors were told bluntly to forget about it.

What does it all mean? It means the U.S./Northern Alliance victory quickly
rolled Afghanistan back to a pre-Taliban boil of warlords, and the war
planners are busy searching for a lid. Lately, it's come in the form of
airstrikes and special forces operations, but this is not enough to arrive
at a lasting peace, only the bandit peace that war-weary Afghans have to
live with for now, which will likely turn many of them into supporters of
warlords, however unsavory, who can keep them safe.

What must the U.S. do? Much more than it seems prepared to. And the process
may well take more than a decade -- not all that long, given what the
country has suffered through. First, the international security assistance
force (ISAF) must grow rapidly to 100,000 troops. ISAF can, with its
increased strength, branch out to cities beyond Kabul, where it has worked
fairly effectively, and help restore public confidence in the civil order.
In Afghanistan, the vast empty space between warlords is never secure. Most
of the road separating the powers in Kabul from Gul Aga's sphere of
influence, for instance, is too dangerous to drive, but the citizens don't
have much choice if they need to travel from one city to another. (The
technique is to leave early in the morning, drive as fast as possible and
stop for absolutely nothing.) If ISAF took on the bandits and secured the
roads, the gratitude of the Afghan people would go off the charts and the
mission would gain enormous public support. The Taliban first gained
credibility by ending banditry and road extortion in Kandahar province, and
that was not an accident of history.

Next, and this is dangerous, the warlords must be completely disarmed, and
Iran and Pakistan restrained by aggressive diplomacy. It should be obvious
that leaving private armies in Afghanistan will result in civil war in a
matter of months. Just as soon as the Americans and ISAF return home, the
fuse will light and Afghans will re-experience the horrors of 1992-93, the
worst years of the civil war. Armed principalities don't make a nation.

The list of critical next steps seems to go on without end. Protection from
famine and drought. Medicine and basic health care. Representative
government. The creation of national institutions like an army. Afghanistan
has a young population desperately in need of work and willing to do it.
There are all manner of things to build -- roads, hospitals, schools -- and
an organization similar to the WPA is the way to start the process. Our help
rebuilding the country offers us a measure of redemption from our complicity
in its destruction, going back to the war against the Soviets, and our
subsequent abandonment of Afghanistan during the last decade.

The cornerstones of a peaceful Afghanistan are not so distant as they would
seem, but it requires what they call in the aid business "a sustained
commitment." And there is good reason to fear that the administration, which
has already eschewed nation-building as overly expensive and a general pain
in the ass, will give Afghanistan a token of its affection and then simply
move on to the next crisis. It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and
significant public pressure might alter the U.S. government's posture in the
region. It's also certain that the administration's either-or take on how to
help Afghanistan -- peacekeepers or the foundation of a national army -- is
a mistake. Peace will require both.

When I was in Afghanistan, soldiers often came up to me with the same
question: Will America help us rebuild? Ashamed, I had to say that I didn't
know the answer. It should, of course, be yes. Throughout both my stays
there, I saw the way Afghans treated journalists as their couriers to the
West, saying to us, "Tell them that we need security, clean water. Tell them
we want to live in peace." We had to make sure to write it all down. Every
request was made with a visceral longing for what we live with day after
day, and we took these messages back in notebooks and tried not to forget
them. It is miraculous that more Afghans are not bitter about what they have
gone through, that so many look to the future with a fair measure of hope.

It seemed to me that for many of the Afghans I met, the meaning of peace
transcended the absence of war. The word promised a resurrection of their
civilization. 

That was another message I came home deterrmined to deliver.



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About the writer
Phillip Robertson is reporting from Afghanistan for Salon.