The mess that is Afghanistan

By S.P.SETH

How is Afghanistan shaping? Not too well.

In the first place, the Karzai’s presidential election saga was a hoot, with him being declared elected with massive rigging of votes where they were cast, and simply stuffing the result with ghost voters. This created a tremendous outcry from his American backers.

He was thus forced into seeking a follow-up election, which he won anyway because he was the only contestant left. Now he is struggling with forming a cabinet because the Afghan parliament has so far refused to rubber-stamp his nominees.

Most of them are his cronies and not qualified for their jobs. Therefore, President Karzai’s legitimacy remains a serious question.

On the American side, President Obama finally made up his mind to send about 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to implement his operational commander’s comprehensive strategy to tackle the Taliban insurgency.

Which includes securing major Afghan cities and towns to provide security for its people, as well as to build up the country’s infrastructure and ensure economic development. How this will be done is a matter of details, and that is where the confusion arises.

Afghanistan has been in constant turmoil since after the Soviet invasion in December 1979---indeed a few years earlier when the Afghan king was overthrown by his cousin Prince Daud.

The disastrous Soviet invasion of the country created the Mujahidin counter-offensive aided and abetted by the US, with the collusion of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and some other Gulf states.

With the Soviet retreat and withdrawal in 1989, the country was plunged into a civil war, leading to the Taliban rule in Afghanistan. This created the environment for the rise of al-Qaida, and 9/11 bombings in the US.

The subsequent US military operations in Afghanistan have now lasted now about 10 years, and still going strong.

The US-sponsored Karzai democracy experiment has been a failure because most Afghans know that he owes his position to American support, with its army occupying the country. Which makes him even more illegitimate, being the proxy of an occupying army.

This is what Lieutenant-General Ruslan Aushev of the Russian army, who served as a commander in the military operations in Afghanistan, has to say in terms of his country’s military operations in Afghanistan for nearly 10 years from 1979-1989.

As quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, he draws a parallel between his country’s mistakes and those of the American-led forces: “We thought it would be over quickly…[but] The civil war only intensified…We took sides. It is the same mistake now being committed by the coalition. You are supporting one element of Afghan society against the other.”

Aushev adds, “To them, you’re outsiders just as we were. History and past experience show the Afghan people don’t like it when outsiders come in, whatever their purpose…”

At some point the US will have to consider, as the Soviets did, that their Afghan experiment is draining their national resources and losing them their international status as the world’s only superpower. And the sooner they do, they might still be able to retrieve their position.