[Peace-discuss] Fisk report from Afghanistan

[Morton K. Brussel]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk- 
nobody-supports-the-taliban-but-people-hate-the-government-1036905.html

Robert Fisk: 'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the  
government'

As he leaves Afghanistan, our correspondent reflects on a failed  
state cursed by brutal fundamentalism and rampant corruption

Thursday, 27 November 2008

The collapse of Afghanistan is closer than the world believes.  
Kandahar is in Taliban hands – all but a square mile at the centre of  
the city – and the first Taliban checkpoints are scarcely 15 miles  
from Kabul. Hamid Karzai's deeply corrupted government is almost as  
powerless as the Iraqi cabinet in Baghdad's "Green Zone"; lorry  
drivers in the country now carry business permits issued by the  
Taliban which operate their own courts in remote areas of the country.

The Red Cross has already warned that humanitarian operations are  
being drastically curtailed in ever larger areas of Afghanistan; more  
than 4,000 people, at least a third of them civilians, have been  
killed in the past 11 months, along with scores of Nato troops and  
about 30 aid workers. Both the Taliban and Mr Karzai's government are  
executing their prisoners in ever greater numbers. The Afghan  
authorities hanged five men this month for murder, kidnap or rape –  
one prisoner, a distant relative of Mr Karzai, predictably had his  
sentence commuted – and more than 100 others are now on Kabul's death  
row.

This is not the democratic, peaceful, resurgent, "gender-sensitive"  
Afghanistan that the world promised to create after the overthrow of  
the Taliban in 2001. Outside the capital and the far north of the  
country, almost every woman wears the all-enshrouding burkha, while  
fighters are now joining the Taliban's ranks from Kashmir,  
Uzbekistan, Chechnya and even Turkey. More than 300 Turkish fighters  
are now believed to be in Afghanistan, many of them holding European  
passports.

"Nobody I know wants to see the Taliban back in power," a Kabul  
business executive says – anonymity is now as much demanded as it was  
before 2001 – "but people hate the government and the parliament  
which doesn't care about their security. The government is useless.  
With so many internally displaced refugees pouring into Kabul from  
the countryside, there's mass unemployment – but of course, there are  
no statistics.

"The 'open market' led many of us into financial disaster.  
Afghanistan is just a battlefield of ideology, opium and political  
corruption. Now you've got all these commercial outfits receiving  
contracts from people like USAID. First they skim off 30 to 50 per  
cent for their own profits – then they contract out and sub-contract  
to other companies and there's only 10 per cent of the original  
amount left for the Afghans themselves."

Afghans working for charitable organisations and for the UN are  
telling their employers that they are coming under increasing  
pressure to give information to the Taliban and provide them with  
safe houses. In the countryside, farmers live in fear of both sides  
in the war. A very senior NGO official in Kabul – again, anonymity  
was requested – says both the Taliban and the police regularly  
threaten villagers. "A Taliban group will arrive at a village  
headman's door at night – maybe 15 or 16 of them – and say they need  
food and shelter. And the headman tells the villagers to give them  
food and let them stay at the mosque. Then the police or army arrive  
in the day and accuse the villagers of colluding with the Taliban,  
detain innocent men and threaten to withhold humanitarian aid. Then  
there's the danger the village will be air-raided by the Americans."

In the city of Ghazni, the Taliban ordered all mobile phones to be  
switched off from 5pm until 6am for fear that spies would use them to  
give away guerrilla locations. The mobile phone war may be one  
conflict the government is winning. With American help the Interior  
Ministry police can now track and triangulate calls. Once more, the  
Americans are talking about forming "tribal militias" to combat the  
Taliban, much as they did in Iraq and as the Pakistani authorities  
have tried to do on the North West Frontier. But the tribal lashkars  
of the Eighties were corrupted by the Russians and when the system  
was first tried out two years ago – it was called the Auxiliary  
Police Force – it was a fiasco. The newly-formed constabulary stopped  
showing up for work, stole weapons and turned themselves into private  
militias.

"Now every time a new Western ambassador arrives in Kabul, they  
dredge it all up again," another NGO official says in near despair.  
"'Oh,' they proclaim, 'let's have local militias – what a bright  
idea.' But that will not solve the problem. The country is subject to  
brigandage as well as the cruelty of the Taliban and the air raids  
which Afghans find so outrageous. The international community has got  
to stop spinning and do some fundamental thinking which should have  
been done four or five years ago."

What this means to those Westerners who have spent years in Kabul is  
simple. Is it really the overriding ambition of Afghans to have  
"democracy"? Is a strong federal state possible in Afghanistan? Is  
the international community ready to take on the warlords and drug  
barons who are within Mr Karzai's own government? And – most  
important of all – is development really about "securing the  
country"? The tired old American adage that "where the Tarmac ends,  
the Taliban begins" is untrue. The Taliban are mounting checkpoints  
on those very same newly-built roads.

The Afghan Minister of Defence has 65,000 troops under his dubious  
command but says he needs 500,000 to control Afghanistan. The Soviets  
failed to contain the country even when they had 100,000 troops here  
with 150,000 Afghan soldiers in support. And as Barack Obama prepares  
to send another 7,000 US soldiers into the pit of Afghanistan, the  
Spanish and Italians are talking of leaving while the Norwegians may  
pull their 500 troops out of the area north of Heart. Repeatedly,  
Western leaders talk of the "key" – of training more and more Afghans  
to fight in the army. But that was the same "key" which the Russians  
tried – and it did not fit the lock.

"We" are not winning in Afghanistan. Talk of crushing the Taliban  
seems as bleakly unrealistic as it has ever been. Indeed, when the  
President of Afghanistan tries to talk to Mullah Omar – one of  
America's principal targets in this wretched war – you know the  
writing is on the wall. And even Mullah Omar didn't want to talk to  
Mr Karzai.

Partition is the one option that no one will discuss – giving the  
southern part of Afghanistan to the Taliban and keeping the rest –  
but that will only open another crisis with Pakistan because the  
Pashtuns, who form most of the Taliban, would want all of what they  
regard as "Pashtunistan"; and that would have to include much of  
Pakistan's own tribal territories. It will also be a return to the  
"Great Game" and the redrawing of borders in south-west Asia,  
something which – history shows – has always been accompanied by  
great bloodshed.
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