Taliban redux

Christina Lamb writes in the London Times about her 20 years in Afghanistan, and how each occupation is built upon the ruins -- and mistakes -- of the last.

Afghanistan was supposed to be different. We had moral imperative to root out those harboring the leadership behind the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. We had the support of the world. We had a real coalition of the willing. And we could feel good knowing we were going to end 25 years of civil war and usher in a new, modern state, replacing the failed one.

Shit.

In some ways there has been remarkable progress from the days when women were forced to wear burqas and were banned from working, studying or laughing out loud.

Last year a parliament was elected in which a quarter of the MPs are women, including a voluptuous gym instructor from the city of Herat. They sit side by side with mullahs and former Taliban commanders to the astonishment of Afghans watching the proceedings on television. Their first debate was over their own pay.

An estimated one-third of the male MPs are warlords, gross violators of human rights or drug smugglers; but, as Karzai says, “better to have them inside rather than outside doing damage”.

But while George W Bush and Tony Blair insisted on declaring Afghanistan a success — and a model for the pacification of Iraq — they apparently forgot one crucial lesson that the British had learnt years before. “Unlike other wars, Afghan wars become serious only when they are over” were the sage words of Sir Olaf Caroe, the last British governor of North West Frontier Province.

Far from Afghanistan being a model for Iraq, Iraq has become a model for Afghanistan. There have been 41 Afghan suicide bombings in the past nine months, compared with five in the preceding five years. IEDs — improvised explosive devices — have become a fact of life. Three were left in roadside handcarts in Kabul last week to detonate as buses went past.

According to United Nations officials, not a day passes without a school being burnt down or a teacher being murdered, often in front of schoolchildren.

If there is one factor most responsible for the Taliban resurgence it is the war in Iraq, which distracted the attention of London and Washington at a critical time. While US marines were toppling statues of Saddam Hussein and then finding themselves fighting a bloody insurgency, the Taliban regrouped and retrained in Pakistan.

From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Mullad Dadullah, the Taliban commander, now claims that he has 12,000 men under arms in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand and Uruzgan.

The southern third of the country, which British troops are supposed to “secure for development”, has long been ungovernable and a no-go area for aid agencies. It is all too easy here for the Taliban to tell local people that the West — and the pro-western government in Kabul — promised aid but has done nothing for them. Where the Taliban are not openly controlling districts, they have set up shadow administrations that assume power as soon as dusk falls.

More alarmingly, the Taliban are no longer just in the south but have even moved into the province of Logar, 25 miles from Kabul. Among their Afghan victims they particularly target police and their relatives as well as guards, road builders and interpreters for western contractors. About 1,500 Afghans were killed by the Taliban last year; 400 have died this year.

Last week an Afghan friend travelling from Kandahar to Kabul on a bus was shocked when a bearded passenger got up, walked to the front and replaced the music cassette that had been playing with a tape of Taliban chanting: “For the next 2½ hours we all sat listening to this terrible stuff and nobody said a word. Two years ago that would have been unthinkable.”

So confident are the Taliban that leaders of the once secretive group have started giving interviews on Afghanistan’s new US-funded Tolo television station. This prompted Karzai last month to impose reporting restrictions that he was forced to rescind by the international community, which felt “censorship” did not sit well with attempts to showcase Afghanistan as a liberal democracy.

“People are scared when they see the Taliban on TV,” said Jamil Karzai, MP for Kabul and a nephew of the president. “Every day I get constituents coming and asking: what does this mean, are the Taliban coming back? We could never have imagined we would get in a situation where such a thing was conceivable.”

“We need to realise that we could actually fail here,” warns Lieutenant-General David Richards, British commander of the Nato-led peacekeeping force. “Think of the psychological victory for Bin Laden and his ilk if we failed and the Taliban came back. Within months we’d suffer terror attacks in the UK. I think of my own daughters in London and the risk they would be in.”

So, tell us again how Bush foreign policy has now taken a more thoughtful, patient turn. Or so the Times headline seems to imply. The actual "news analysis" seems to arrive at a very different conclusion.

To Mr. Bush's critics, the question goes to the heart of the new argument over pre-emption: whether Mr. Bush, in focusing on Iraq in 2003, missed his chance. It was in January of that year, as American forces were flowing toward the Middle East, that North Korea threw out the international inspectors who had been watching over its stockpile of nuclear fuel, and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The action did not have the drama of a multiple-missile launchings. But unlike the test-firings, it was a clearer violation of international law. (Any country has a right to exit the treaty with 90 days' notice, but the North evicted the inspectors before that period expired.)

But Mr. Bush made no effort then to seek sanctions at the United Nations Security Council, or to rally China and Russia to impose economic sanctions. One senior former official who was involved in the discussions said Mr. Bush was briefed on his military options to strike at the nuclear facilities before the spent fuel rods were moved — but the options looked bad, and he turned back to the Iraq invasion plan.

I know this will not strike you, Dear Reader, as inspired, but: Worst. Ever.