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Afghanistan: What’s the future hold?
Officials of the new ‘government’ steal grain, counterfeit money, and maintain private armies. Can interim leader Karzai fashion a nation out of feudal chaos?
BY ANDREW BUSHELL

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The clock is ticking. In the two months since the rout of the Taliban, and despite an international agreement reached at the UN Talks in Bonn in December to form an interim government under Hamid Karzai, this nation has once again become a cluster of city-states ruled by autonomous warlords. So far, the new government has been powerless to halt the return of chaos. Karzai has five months left in his temporary term of office to either stabilize the situation or turn it around. Achieving either objective will be a political — and possibly military — miracle.

Some degree of political stability and governmental unity is crucial if the international-aid effort is to succeed in feeding and rebuilding this war-ravaged land, where an estimated 80 percent of the population is illiterate. But recent history doesn’t bode well. Afghanistan’s last attempt at coalition government, in the 1990s, fell apart when civil war erupted among rival warlords. Most of the warlords — veterans of the CIA sponsored "holy war" of resistance against the Soviet invaders — became so disenchanted with the anarchy that they willingly submitted to rule by the Taliban, giving little thought, it seems, to the radical Islamist sect’s own totalitarian tendencies. In most quarters today, self-interest, tribal loyalty, and regional hegemony continue to trump national need. Underscoring the fragility of the situation, leaders serving in cabinet positions under the Bonn agreement at first refused to leave their scattered power bases throughout the country. And when they finally met, the overriding subject of concern was how firewood would be distributed to the new cabinet — not an unimportant issue in a largely bombed-out nation without central heating, but certainly not one calculated to address the massive troubles faced by the entire country.

When wealthy donor nations and aid organizations gathered at the Afghanistan-reconstruction summit in Tokyo last week, two questions were paramount in the minds of bureaucrats and government officials: "Will aid money get to the right places?" and "How will a country with no infrastructure be able to spend it?" These questions are fair enough, but they beg the larger issue: ‘How will the Western-coalition nations prevent diversion of aid without a substantial military peacekeeping effort?"

TRAVELING BY road is the easiest way to observe the atomization of Afghanistan. Driving down the highway, which is little more than a dirt trail strewn with rocks, from the Pakistan border to Kabul is like running the gauntlet. Barreling down the uneven track, cars race at high speed without stopping; checkpoints are never good news. The bone-jarring trip could be pleasant if circumstances were different. Afghanistan’s blue skies and stark landscape look remarkably like Southern California on a sunny day — only it’s colder.

The natural beauty, however, masks the dread any trip like this evokes. It’s been well reported how four journalists were dragged out of their convoy and beaten to death between Jalalabad and Kabul late last year. If reports are to be believed, bandits have killed as many as 20 people making the trek since then. Two days before I made my first trip, I heard that two civilians were stopped by bandits and killed. Transport between cities has become so difficult that the UN stopped grain shipments over three weeks ago and appealed for security forces to protect the roads. Villagers just a few miles outside Jalalabad in the east and Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, with no other food, were forced to eat grass in the hills.

Because Afghanistan is fragmented into what are, in effect, feudal holdings, every region in Afghanistan lives by a different set of rules. Since local militias depend upon regional warlords for food and money, there is little incentive to change a system that has kept them alive for more than 20 years. According to Jabbar Nassery, a jovial Afghan moneychanger in Peshawar who speaks fondly of the order introduced by the Taliban even though his father worked for ex-president Mohammed Rabbani, "The situation has reverted to as it was before the Taliban. The leaders have changed sides, where once they wore lunghi [the traditional Taliban headdress], now they wear pachula [the headdress favored by the Northern Alliance]." Nassery is not alone. Dozens of Afghans interviewed feel the only thing keeping Afghanistan from dissolving into overt civil war is the threat of American bombing.

Aside from Kabul, where fewer than 500 peacekeepers struggle to maintain order, each of the five major cities in Afghanistan has reverted to the pre-Taliban control of warlords. With the exception of Kandahar, no city even pretends to support Hamid Karzai’s new government in Kabul. And even in Kandahar, as prominent a figure as General Gul Agha Shirzai ignored Kabul’s request to turn over seven high-ranking ministers in the Taliban government to American authorities.

Who are these men? Mohammed Rabbani, based in the north near Mazar-e-Sharif, was the president of the Northern Alliance for most of the last decade. Rabbani led a government so corrupt it was overthrown by the Taliban with vast popular support. Unsurprisingly, he was passed over to head the provisional Afghan government and left without a brief when the UN Talks in Bonn established the new regime. However, Rabbani still has plenty supporters. He has every interest in seeing Karzai fail. Insiders whisper he is behind the escalation of rivalries between Tajiks and Uzbeks in northern parts of Afghanistan.

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Issue Date: January 31 - February 7, 2002
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