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| Afghan Choices or American Interests? |
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In many parts of Afghanistan insecurity is rife with Afghan security forces largely non- existent. The international peacekeeping force that exists in the country is very limited - there is in total eight thousand members of the NATO led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in a country three times the size of the UK and these forces are largely concentrated around Kabul. Consequently there are many reports of murders, kidnapping and rapes. Human Rights Watch charged in March 2005 that numerous former warlords, who currently hold provincial governorships and top police jobs, "have been implicated in widespread rapes of women and children, murder, illegal detention, forced displacement, human trafficking and forced marriage."xii On the subject, the UNDP report states: “Sustained peace in Afghanistan is not guaranteed despite the early successes in state-building that have now led to elections. Human security is still needed in Afghanistan. The breakdown of institutions has left the population vulnerable to the whims of peace-spoilers and their private militias, which can easily raise and sustain an army from among impoverished populations.”
Despite the holding of ‘sovereign’ elections the US military maintains between fifteen to twenty thousand American soldiers in Afghanistan under the pretext of ensuring that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are never able to return to power in the future. US forces are continually involved in missions in order to arrest or eliminate Taliban or Al-Qaeda members despite repeated claims that these groups have been defeated. US forces have also realised that it may be unrealistic to arrest or eliminate all those involved in the former Taliban government, and therefore offers of reconciliation are now being given to low-level Taliban who were not connected with Al-Qaeda or were not involved in atrocities,xiii though few have taken up this offer.xiv However, eliminating Taliban and Al-Qaeda is not a priority shared by Afghans who when asked clearly state that they would choose disarming warlords as the first priority of the Afghan government, compared to the 3 to 4 percent who hope for a swift elimination of the remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.xv
In addition the US has established detention centres all across the country and they include camps in Gardez, Khost, Asadabad, Jalalabad and Kandahar, as well as the major “collection centre” in the Bagram air force base. It is believed that the Americans are holding thousands of Afghans in these prisons in addition to using them for detaining and interrogating other foreign prisoners who have been flown into Afghanistan. The US military refuses to comment on whom it holds within its Afghan prisons but reports from people released such as Kamal Sadat, a local employee for the BBC World Service, who was mistakenly arrested and interrogated, indicate that the prison are filled from suspects from many countries. It has been suggested that these detention centres in Afghanistan will eventually replace those in Guantanamo Bay where the administration’s authority to hold prisoners without due process has now been challenged by the US Supreme Court. Many Afghans recognise that the US is exploiting the weakness of their country; Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission in Kabul, in an interview with Guardian journalists said: “Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned enormous serious human rights abuse.”xvi Over a period of 18 months, the Human Rights Commission had registered over 800 allegations of human rights abuse committed by US forces.
There are few grounds to be optimistic about the future of Afghanistan and using the low benchmark of the former Taliban regime is not a meaningful basis of measurement. David Saba one of the authors of the UNDP report on Afghanistan accurately sums up the sentiment when he states ''Our team found the overwhelming majority of people hold a sense of pessimism and fear that reconstruction is bypassing them.'' As in Iraq, the US has failed to bring safety and security to the people it has invaded and is failing to bring major improvements to people lives despite huge pledges by the international community. This is fundamentally because of the underlying strategic gap between the interests of Washington and the Afghan people. The Afghan presidential elections were no different from those conducted by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and make elections in other developing countries look Jeffersonian by comparison. The rise in opium has in the words of the American State Department almost made Afghanistan a ‘narcotics state’. Afghanistan remains occupied by almost 15,000 American troops and is set to be a major offshore American prison receiving suspects of America’s ‘war on terror’ from all across the globe. However these negative conclusions do not just emanate from critics of US foreign policy; an Afghan minister, who understandably prefers to be anonymous said, “Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability.”xvii
Indeed the major problem in Afghanistan is not one of economic resources but of political will. Afghanistan is not a ‘basket case’ and the main priority for the Afghans is to realise that they must solve the problem themselves to confront their own demons and to get their own politics right. Unfortunately for its citizens they been invaded twice by major external powers in the last 25 years and this remains the hub of their problem. The Karzai regime promotes political and security dependency on the US led coalition. It continually transmits the negative image that Afghanistan is a perpetual beggar, dependant upon western largess rather than an independent nation acting on its own, free of external influence. It is therefore clear that Washington and Kabul’s interests are poles apart and unless the Afghan people can rest their sovereignty from the occupying force and become truly free people, they will not be able to overcome their current tribulations. Sham elections of the type held last October cannot cover up this fundamental reality
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