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 here
was a wonderful perspective-building moment at the White House yesterday
when President Bush and Chairman Hamid Karzai faced the White House
press corps. As the president was gratuitously prodded by journalists
on the Enron non-scandal, the green-silk-bedecked Afghan interim
leader stood by patiently, introspectively, his expression seeming
to say, "Wow, I wish I had your problems."
Hamid Karzai
has proven to be a wise and trustworthy leader who understands the
United States and can speak its language (literally and otherwise).
But Karzai may not be the leader with whom the United States will
be dealing in the long run. Shortly before Karzai left for the United
States he announced the names of the 21 members of the Loya Jirga
Commission, a nominally nonpartisan panel that will organize the
tribal council that will serve essentially as the Afghan constitutional
convention. The Loya Jirga will set up the two-year transitional
government (as distinguished from the six-month interim government),
which will be replaced by a democratically elected permanent government
put in place by rules to be determined at a future date. The commission
faces overwhelmingly complex questions, such as which groups will
be represented at the Loya Jirga, how their delegates will be selected,
when the meeting will be held and for how long, where it will take
place, and what the rules of procedure will be once the council
convenes. This process will be monitored by the U.N. to ensure as
much fairness as possible, but it is certain to lead to vigorous
factional struggles; and despite promises that the transition process
will be peaceful, the threat of force will always be present. Karzai
stated that the "era of warlords is over" but the era
of peacelords is still a long way off.
Rashid Dostum,
the by now familiar brooding Uzbek warlord cum Afghan Deputy Defense
Minister, is a case in point. He has reconstructed his semi-autonomous
region in north-central Afghanistan centered on Mazar-e Sharif,
and has been put in charge of building the new Afghan national army.
Part of his mission is to disarm the other warlords. I would be
taking no risk whatsoever in predicting that he will not even nominally
undertake this task. The other factional and tribal leaders view
him with emotions ranging from mistrust to disgust, and he does
not have the military assets to disarm them by force. But the only
reason Dostum was given the assignment was because he would not
tolerate anyone else having it, and would not have cooperated with
the interim government under any other conditions. He has recently
pledged that he will lay down his arms if international support
is extended and his security is guaranteed — which means that
he does not trust the efforts of his own government to disarm the
warlords — which of course is his job. He has denied reports
of recent clashes with the Tajik forces to the east — the same
Northern Alliance faction with which he competed for control of
the al Qaeda prisoners from Konduz who later rioted at Mazar —
and stated that "from now on personal interest will not be
held above national ones in Afghanistan." He cryptically added
that he will "deal with any action that might have ulterior
motives." Clearly, trust is not running high.
In other parts
of the country the traditional lines of cleavage have emerged. Reports
have surfaced of Iranian agents establishing ties with the Shiites
in western Afghanistan, and attempting to spread their influence
into Helmand and Kandahar provinces. In the south and east, tribal
leaders, some of whom collaborated with the Taliban, jockey for
favorable positions in cities and along trade routes. The Afghan
government directly controls only a small section of the country
around Kabul, the same areas that had been under the direct control
of the Soviet-backed government in the 1980s, the same zone of control
stretching back to the days of the monarchy. Afghanistan is a decentralized
country and will remain so, even if nominally at peace. The era
of the warlords is never really over, they just periodically
reload.
Karzai has
been on a world tour raising money for his war-ravaged country.
He has secured pledges of $4.5 billion in foreign aid over five
years, $1.8 billion to be frontloaded in 2002. Afghanistan is the
kind of country where $1.8 billion can go a long way. But it faces
the same problem as Colombia and other agricultural states where
drug-related cultivation is rampant. The return on the sale of opium
poppies is more than 600 times the yield for a comparable weight
of wheat. Seventy percent of Afghan opium is cultivated in the provinces
around Kandahar (which may also have something to do with the Iranian
interest in the area). It will be difficult to dissuade starving
farmers and returning merchants to pass up the opportunity for quick
profits derived from the drug trade.
These and other
matters are on the forefront of issues for the international community
to deal with, and will require the long-term presence of peacekeeping
forces to buttress the political reforms. Chairman Karzai had hoped
that U.S. troops would make up part of the ISAF force in Afghanistan,
but President Bush has held firm; Ari Fleischer stated that the
president's philosophy is that the United States should not be "overly
deployed" in peacekeeping efforts. While this clearly wasn't
Mr. Fleischer's most articulate moment, it is both noteworthy and
praiseworthy that the president is adhering to a promise made during
the presidential campaign to focus the efforts of the United States
military on fighting and winning wars, and away from the Clinton-era
obsession for open-ended, resource-sapping, and spirit-deadening
military-occupation missions. This is a philosophy Mr. Bush articulated
as early as the second presidential debate and has for the most
part held fast to. Those who maintain that it is the Clinton-built
military that has prosecuted the war completely miss the point that
the whole issue was over leadership, and the Bush national-security
team has delivered the very type of leadership he promised. After
all, the only thing that kept the "Clinton military" from
fighting this war under President Clinton was Clinton himself.
Our allies
in the war on terror have been more than willing to assume the peacekeeping
role that the United States is abstaining from. The British and
French have had peacekeeping (as well as combat) units in Afghanistan
for months. The Spanish have sent ground and air forces, the Canadians
are deploying a 750 soldier battle-group — in all, 4,500 international
troops will make up ISAF. U.S. forces will still be on available
to assist if our allies "get in trouble," but in the meantime
they are pursuing the still hot trails of the Taliban and al Qaeda
terrorists. Mullah Omar has yet to be located, and Osama bin Laden
is still at large. Bombers are still flying missions, and our ground
troops are still coming under hostile fire, most notably the soldiers
who helped storm the hospital in Kandahar in which a half dozen
al Qaeda recalcitrants had holed up. The report of U.S. troops wearing
New York Yankees caps certainly lent a sense of payback to the engagement.
If the terrorists want to fight to the death, we have plenty of
volunteers to help them.
Hamid Karzai
may yet emerge as Afghanistan's long-term head of government. If
he does it will certainly be incontrovertible proof of his political
acumen. In any case, when President Bush recognizes Chairman Karzai
during tonight's State of the Union address the moment will be strongly
symbolic. Four and a half months ago the United States descended
into a maelstrom, involuntarily but with determination, and from
it we have pulled the nation of Afghanistan. The war on terror is
far from over, and Afghanistan faces a long road to recovery, but
even with the challenges both nations face in the months and years
ahead this is an appropriate moment for these two leaders to stand
together, to pause in the midst of conflict and pay homage to our
respective sacrifices, celebrate our shared successes, and set out
confidently on the difficult but promising way ahead.
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