Enter the Peacelords
Taking stock.

By James S. Robbins, a national-security analyst & NRO contributor
January 29, 2002 8:35 a.m.

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.