The latest atrocity in Afghanistan — a dozen children killed by a ”bicycle bomb” in Kandahar on Tuesday — is a reminder that Iraq is not the only place where US-sponsored regime change has not produced peace. Along with the news that the UN may appoint a politically savvy British general to run its Afghan operations, it reinforces the view that postwar stabilisation requires a more sensitive linking of civilian and military initiatives than has yet been achieved in either country. Defeating insurgencies cannot be done by the iron fist alone.
In Afghanistan the problem has taken longer to surface than in Iraq. After the fall of the Taliban, the new government of Hamid Karzai initially faced minimal armed opposition. The warlords of the Northern Alliance, who had captured Kabul as the ground troops of the US air force, posed a political challenge to Karzai’s efforts to restore strong central rule over the north and west. But they largely kept their guns holstered. In the Pashtun south and east, where the Taliban had been strongest, the post-war situation was broadly, even surprisingly, calm.
Only in the past six months has insecurity in the Pashtun areas begun to worsen. Just how far is a matter of debate. The outward signs are certainly not good. The UN has pulled its international officials out of the region, as have most foreign aid agencies, because of murders and abductions. Voter registration for the presidential elections, which are due in June, has ground to a halt in Kandahar after the mullahs of two mosques where it was being held were threatened. The World Food Programme is supplying less than half its promised amount of grain to the needy because lorry drivers and others fear for their lives. The UN refugee agency has stopped helping Afghans return from Pakistan.
Some Afghan officials believe the international agencies are over-reacting to a relatively small number of incidents over a vast geographical area. They claim the trouble is caused by only a hundred or so people, infiltrating in tiny groups across the border from Pakistan, but determined to create chaos and terror. Southern Afghanistan’s problem, they say, is not widespread Pashtun alienation but a result of geography. Pakistan’s border provinces are under the control of hardline Islamists who work with elements of Pakistan’s secret agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, to keep Afghanistan weak.
Two facts seem incontrovertible. One is that the violence has increased in almost direct proportion to the efforts of the 11 000 American troops who are in southern and eastern Afghanistan, trying to ”eliminate al-Qaeda”. Careless bombing and heavy-handed US tactics by ground troops when they search villages are making more enemies than friends.
The other is that, fairly or not, a large number of Pashtun still feel they lost out when the Taliban regime collapsed. This does not mean they all supported the Taliban’s extreme religious ideology but rather that they see the balance tipping against the Pashtun throughout Afghanistan since Mullah Omar and his cronies were driven from power. The tens of thousands of Pashtun who have been ethnically cleansed from the north are the most obvious human sign of that.
It is true that Karzai is a Pashtun, as are his finance and interior ministers (though the latter are overseas Afghans with US passports). But there is a sense that, both locally and centrally, the Pashtun are not benefiting properly. Neither development money for local projects nor officer positions in the new national army are going to them in fair doses.
Reversing this sense of discrimination can be done, especially after the recent constitutional convention endorsed Karzai’s powers as president. But he should also consider a more radical move. The time has come to bite the political bullet and open talks with the Taliban.
It is not a matter of sitting down with Mullah Omar or anyone else who claims to represent the Taliban as though it still exists as a single movement (if it ever did). But it does mean responding to overtures from individual former Taliban officials who fear arrest if they return openly from hiding or from abroad, or who are in US custody but have no proven records as torturers, such as the former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil.
Paradoxically, this ought to be easier for Karzai and the Americans than it is for the warlords of the north. Before the Taliban came to power and when they first conquered Kabul, Washington had links with them. Karzai himself helped them and was trusted enough to be invited in 1996 to be their UN representative (he refused). The northern warlords will try to veto this, but unless the message is put across, in deed as much as word, that not all who joined the Taliban are unwelcome, violence in the south will go on and on. – Guardian Unlimited Â