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Thread ID: 15250 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-10-07
2004-10-07 15:50 | User Profile
Interesting article from Mr Trikkovic over at Chronicles. For those of you who have not been keeping up, Afghanistan is a complete disaster.
[url="http://chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsViews.htm%20"]http://chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsViews.htm [/url]
AFGHANISTAN'S DUBIOUS EXERCISE IN "DEMOCRACY" by Srdja Trifkovic
In Afghanistan's first-ever direct presidential election, scheduled for next Saturday October 9, its interim president Hamid Karzai will win and become a "democratically elected leader." This will be the first test of President George W. Bush's heralded objective of bringing democracy to the Middle East, orââ¬âto be precise in this particular caseââ¬âto a much-troubled spot half-way between Mesopotamia and the Sub-Continent.
It is absurd but true that an election in a dirt-poor country of mostly illiterate tribesmen on the other side of the world may have an impact on the presidential race in the United States. In the first debate with John Kerry last Thursday President Bush repeated twice that "ten million citizens have registered to vote" in Afghanistan, calling this "a phenomenal statistic" that heralds the country's democratic transformation: "They're given a chance to be free, and they will show up at the polls," he said, pointing out that "forty-one percent of those 10 million are women."
The first problem with this statement concerns facts: the statistic is truly "phenomenal" since Afghanistan's estimated eligible voting population is less than ten million . Such extremely high registration figures suggest that many Afghans are registering multiple times, raising concerns for the validity of the election. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as half of the 10 million have registered more than once, and ballot cards are openly offered for sale in open-air markets. In some provinces more people are registered to vote than are known to live there. In a country that issues neither birth certificates nor identity cards there will be a bare handful of international poll observers. Most of the poll monitoring will be entrusted to local policeââ¬âmany of whom are either former Taliban, or members of the militias fielded by warlords, or both.
These and other fraudulent practices are encouraged by local warlords who continue to control substantial swaths of Afghanistan's roadless outback, where ballots are delivered on donkeys' backs. They are intimidating voters into supporting their chosen candidates. Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, warns that the militias have already told people in the rural areas how to vote, while activists and political organizers who oppose the warlords fear for their lives. Ordinary Afghans have no confidence in the secrecy of the process and they will have to obey the people with guns: on election day there will be 28,000 U.S. and NATO forces and 13,500 Afghan soldiers to keep the peace, but four-fifths of the country will remain unprotected.
The warlords are unexpectedly eager to support Afghanistan's "democratic transformation" because they are the only ones able to buy enough votes and to apply enough local intimidation to give their power a veneer of legality at home and some legitimacy in foreign eyes. A typical example is provided by General Abdul Rashid Dostum. A former communist general known to have ordered enemy captives crushed under a Russian tank, Dostum is trying to transform himself from warlord into smiling presidential candidate:
"Dostum's idea of campaigning is to sit on a thronelike chair in his rose garden and scowl at a line of deferential tribal elders, officials and militia commanders who will be expected to deliver votes from among the Uzbeks. Those who don't obey sufferââ¬âsuch as one Uzbek man whose wife was kidnapped when he refused to rejoin Dostum's forces. "
Karzai's main rival, Yunus Qanooni, is a former resistance leader who still commands loyalty from Tajik fighters in the north. Qanooni's men will provide "security" in the polling stations in the Tajik region, raising the prospect of intimidation. Karzai himself is not above similar shinenigansââ¬âhis supporters ahve threatened to burn the homes of those who vote against himââ¬âbut unlike his rivals he enjoys open American support. He wants to win in the first round, beating all other 17 candidates outright and consolidating his still tenuous hold on power. That hope seems to be shared by the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad:
"Senior Afghan officials, U.N. representatives and Western diplomats all claim that Khalilzad, an energetic Afghan American, is trying to induce several candidates to drop out and throw their support behind Karzai. The ambassador denies that, even though one candidate, Mohammed Mohaqiq, went public with such an accusation. Khalilzad and Karzai dine together at least three times a week, palace insiders say, and many Afghans, by nature conspiratorially minded, are convinced that the election's outcome is rigged to favor Karzai. "
Khalilzad denies bias or interference, but then goes on to say that "President Karzai has represented Afghanistan very well? We have a good working relationship with him. He deserves credit for what has been achieved here." He has also declared that "we are breaking the backbone of the warlords" which is simply not the caseââ¬âunless we assume that a warlord "democratically" elected to high office or given a ministerial rank thus ceases to be a warlord.
Karzai controls the media and has received over 75 percent of all state TV and radio coverage since the campaign's start in early September, with the other candidates complaining that they are being ignored . He is soliciting warlords' supportââ¬ânotably that of the powerful mujahideen leader Ismail Khan from Heratââ¬âby offering them ministerial posts. But with the Administration eager to present a rosy picture of Afghanistan's "democratic transformation," the forthcoming electoral irregularities and behind-the-scenes deals will be duly overlooked. "There will be an election in Afghanistan," says a Western analyst familiar with the region, "and in its aftermath we'll have a continuing glut of narcotics abroad, and continued lawlessness, extortion, robbery, and murder inside the country."
Three years after the Afghan war the endeavor's most tangible effect in the U.S. has been the rising availability and falling price of heroin. Whereas the former Taliban regime proved brutally effective in curtailing the production of opium, output has skyrocketed under its U.S.-sponsored successors and provides three-quarters of the world's supply. Much of it is being processed into morphine and heroin inside Afghanistanââ¬âa rare example of profitable industrial activity in the country. The magnitude of the problem is becoming comparable to that created by Columbian cartels two decades ago.
American troops are unable to target the producers' bosses, whose identities are well known to all, because opium cultivation and trade are controlled by local warlords who are nominally allied with Karzai. He cannot afford to alienate local strongmen so he is sending them personal appeals instead . He is reduced to seeking the support of former Taliban officials, "in an effort to stabilize the democratic process." Karzai's own authority does not extend much beyond Kabul, and only by appeasing the warlords can he maintain the appearance of the country's coherence. In return, these disagreeable and violent men are granted impunity in their strongholds.
To make matters worse, the Taleban is making a comeback. The deaths of three Afghan soldiers and two pro-Taleban guerrillas over the weekend brought to almost a thousand the number of people reported killed in political violence this year, with the actual figure almost certainly far higher . Such attacks occur almost daily, and the magnitude of the problem is seen in the ability of Islamic diehards to field substantial units: Afghan intelligence officials in the southern city of Kandahar say more than 2,000 Taliban fighters are roaming the desert outskirts of the city.
The Islamists' resurgence is partly fuelled by the nationalist sentiment of the Pashtuns who inhabit the eastern and southern parts of the country. They resent the monopoly on power that the Tajiks of the north enjoy in Karzai's regime. Karzai, a Pashtun himself, is despised by many of his kinsmen as a traitor. Although they are hardly more Islamic or more anti-Western than any "Northern Alliance" warlord, many Pashtuns support the Taliban because it is the tool available to fight their traditional enemies. The proximity of the Pashtuns' kinsmen across the border in Pakistan enables the guerrillas to evade pursuers and to enjoy the safety of bases inside Pakistan's tribal areas. The situation is comparable to when the Taliban seized power in the mid-1990s: a weak government in the center, autonomous warlords in the north and the west, and Pashtun guerrillas in the east and south.
The role of Pakistan is adding to the uncertainty. The government of General Perwez Musharrafââ¬âand notably its powerful military intelligence service, the ISIââ¬âis suspected by some U.S. officers in Afghanistan of providing the Taliban with sanctuary and weapons after a period of hands-off caution in the aftermath of 9-11. President. Bush's pretense that Musharrafââ¬âa possessor and proliferator of nuclear WMDââ¬âis an ally in the War on Terror can be understood as a political expedient, but the reality is very different. He has not clamped down on madrassas and other Islamic institutions that breed terrorists, and he has not purged the Pakistani army of officers implicated in previous dealings with the Taliban. They allow Taliban fighters to slip across the border and to stay out of the U.S. military's reach, and they may be sheltering Osama bin Laden himself.
If there is an undisputed victory for Karzai, that election will be invoked by Mr. Bush to support his claim that the Afghan alleged success can be replicated in Iraq. The reality behind that "success" is complex and unsavory, and the U.S. would do well to disengage soon. With all the talk about "democracy" it is often overlooked that the purpose of the Afghan operation was to capture Usama bin Laden. A military operation prompted by the reasonable desire to punish and neutralize the culprits for 9-11 did not have the stated objective of "bringing democracy to Afghanistan," and should not be retroactively turned into an open-ended nation-building project. What America needs after Karzai's inauguration next week is to declare victory, wrap things up, and get out of Afghanistan. Karzai may not last long on his own, which may be regrettable, but it is of no consequence as long as the Taliban don't return to power. That can be prevented more effectively by putting pressure on Pakistanââ¬âthere is ample leverageââ¬âthan by maintaining NATO peacekeepers in Kabul and GI's in the provinces.
2004-10-07 16:37 | User Profile
......at least the junkies are happier these days.:drool: