[Update: I fear that yesterday I may have been hasty and alarmist about the Pentagon’s advanced surveillance research. Fortunately, as Adam Clymer of the New York Times reports, the Pentagon itself has corrected any misperception. It’s not actually aimed at us: “Saying they are worried about Americans’ privacy, Pentagon officials announced in a report today that they were changing the name of a projected system to mine databases for information to help catch terrorists to Terrorist Information Awareness from Total Information Awareness. The officials said the name was changed because the earlier version created a false impression that system was being created ‘for developing dossiers on U.S. citizens.'” (New Name of Pentagon Data Sweep Focuses on Terror) I think the name change does the trick for me. How about you?]
Afghanistan — it’s the land that time, or at least this administration, forgot. It’s the nation-building that didn’t happen and its fate offers a hint of one possible future for occupied Iraq. In the glow of success after our little Afghan war and the fall of the Taliban, much in the way of reconstruction funds was promised, but relatively little of the money seems to have appeared and security is such in the country that, if it did, it might prove nearly unusable.
The essence of any “reconstruction,” of any form of “nation-building” is obviously money. You only have to take a glimpse at where the money is going in Washington under this administration — to the Pentagon and the rich (via tax cuts), not to the states, what’s left of the social safety net, the environment, or much else, including genuine national security. There is basically no money for Iraq, none at least that the American people are likely to tolerate being sent there. And there’s even less for forlorn Afghanistan, where tensions are running high and small scale civil wars among the troops of the various “warlords” who control the country are underway. (See April Witt’s vivid account from the Washington Post of one such ongoing micro-battlefield below.) Tensions there are high. American troops at the U.S. embassy in Kabul just shot four Afghan soldiers in what is now being termed by an embassy official a “misunderstanding.” And quietly, as in Iraq today, and in small numbers, Americans are dying. Four died last month. This is the slow drain of imperial guard duty out on the global frontiers of empire.
The central government of Hamid Karzai has essentially no money to draw on in the national treasury. None. Just yesterday the regional warlords signed a deal to turn over customs money to Kabul — but without any enforcement provisions whatsoever. So not much is likely to change. In the meantime, a small-scale guerrilla war by reorganized elements of the Taliban against the American and European forces still in the country, their Afghan allies, and humanitarian aid workers continues in part from across the border in the “tribal areas” of Pakistan, now partially controlled by a fundamentalist coalition of Pakistani political parties. This is a kind of regional house of cards, reports the ever-reliable Ahmed Rashid, author of the definitive book Taliban, in a piece on Pakistan in the Far Eastern Economic Review ( Beset on All Sides, but you need to register with the magazine to read its offerings). Of a recent Karzai visit to Pakistan where he delivered what has to be seen as an American threat, Rashid reports:
On April 22 and 23, Karzai visited Islamabad to present [Pakistani dictator]Musharraf with a list of Taliban commanders who are living in Pakistan and conducting guerrilla attacks in Afghanistan. Afghan officials admitted that Karzai’s blunt move was prompted by a tougher line being taken by Washington. Four U.S. and more than 30 Afghan soldiers were killed in April in clashes with the Taliban.
“We have given the names of some top Taliban leaders for the Pakistani authorities to take action on,” Karzai told the REVIEW in Islamabad. ‘Pakistan has to address this issue of extremism . . . This has to be done for the sake of Pakistan also. The actions of these extremists, if they continue, will have implications in Pakistan.'”
American dreams about Iraq have centered on oil, its only potential source of wealth — tourism being out of the question for who knows how long. Afghanistan has its source of wealth, too, on the basis of which the country is indeed being reconstructed as a “narco-mafia state” rather than on a model that is likely to impress the world or please Washington. Its wealth lies in poppies and — this isn’t something you see much written about, so good for Mother Jones magazine — Michael Scherer informs us that in the year and a half since we triumphed, the country’s greatest claim to fame is that poppy production has increased eighteen-fold and Afghanistan is once again responsible for 75% of the world’s heroin. And in Washington where our leaders roar on about a twenty or thirty or forty-year war against terrorism, the drug war (except as a cover for another kind of intervention in Colombia) is a dead letter. Just say yes! Tom
“We have given the names of some top Taliban leaders for the Pakistani authorities to take action on,” Karzai told the REVIEW in Islamabad. ‘Pakistan has to address this issue of extremism . . . This has to be done for the sake of Pakistan also. The actions of these extremists, if they continue, will have implications in Pakistan.'”
American dreams about Iraq have centered on oil, its only potential source of wealth — tourism being out of the question for who knows how long. Afghanistan has its source of wealth, too, on the basis of which the country is indeed being reconstructed as a “narco-mafia state” rather than on a model that is likely to impress the world or please Washington. Its wealth lies in poppies and — this isn’t something you see much written about, so good for Mother Jones magazine — Michael Scherer informs us that in the year and a half since we triumphed, the country’s greatest claim to fame is that poppy production has increased eighteen-fold and Afghanistan is once again responsible for 75% of the world’s heroin. And in Washington where our leaders roar on about a twenty or thirty or forty-year war against terrorism, the drug war (except as a cover for another kind of intervention in Colombia) is a dead letter. Just say yes! Tom
The Return of the Poppy Fields
Michael Scherer
Mother Jones
May 19, 2003Early this spring, the Afghan government sent an armed patrol into the mountains east of Kabul to uproot the illegal opium fields. The local farmers of Nangarhar province fought back, taking up guns to defend the plants that feed their families. “The resistance was extremely fierce,” says Aziz Arya, an economist for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, who was working nearby. “People were hurt on both sides.” More importantly, the government retreated, leaving most of the poppy intact.
Unfortunately, such clashes have become typical of modern day Afghanistan, where tribal chiefs and private armies still control the countryside and the official government struggles with scant resources in Kabul. American led security and reconstruction efforts are stumbling, say observers, leaving a vacuum that has increasingly been filled with the most profitable and deadly of crops.
Michael Scherer is Mother Jones Magazine’s Washington editor.
To read more Scherer click here
Karzai Powerless As Warlords Battle
Afghanistan’s Leader Unable to Prevent Violence
By April Witt
Washington Post
May 18, 2003Meymaneh, Afghanistan — Assassins with their turbans wrapped to hide their faces ambushed a convoy on a main street in the middle of an April afternoon, executing Rasul Beg, a mid-level local militia commander, and igniting one of the fiercest battles between rival warlords ever waged in this northern town.
The gunfight lasted 20 hours, killed 13 people, including an 8-year-old boy, trapped international aid workers and left President Hamid Karzai’s administration struggling to extend the rule of law to this provincial capital about 300 miles northwest of Kabul, the capital.
“I’m in a bad situation,” said Enayatullah Enayat, a former Supreme Court justice whom Karzai recently sent here to serve as governor of surrounding Faryab province. “The warlords have men with guns and I don’t. They might kill me.”