On
The Roads Of Ruin
By Peter
Oborne
Observer
26 May, 2003
To begin with, post-conflict Kabul looks a success story. It is true
that massive areas of the town still resemble Dresden after World War
II. The wreckage of war is everywhere - gutted buildings, uncleared
minefields, crashed planes, burnt-out tanks and the human wreckage of
hobbling landmine victims and the war widows in blue burqas extending
their hands for alms at every street corner. But this pitiful background
of destruction and carnage only makes the surrounding economic and social
activity all the more remarkable. Everywhere there is testimony to the
tenacity of the human spirit, from the little shops that have sprung
up in the ground floors of smashed houses to the taxi trade: up from
barely 200 under the Taliban to an amazing 40,000, it is credibly said,
today.
Restaurants open every week:
a new Iranian kebab house is currently all the rage. The Aga Khan is
building a five-star hotel. Rents - stimulated by the diplomatic and
United Nations presence - are sky high. In some parts of town, a four-bedroom
house at the end of a potholed road can earn $10,000 a month. The free
and secure country promised by Tony Blair and George Bush in late 2001
looks to be emerging smoothly. But you do not need to be in Afghanistan
long to sense the forces that undermine the gilded café society
of aid-workers, diplomats, businessmen, spies and westernized Afghans.
This spring the Taliban and
al-Qaeda, who have never been eradicated, and still lurk murderously
in the mountains, gathering strength, moved on to a new strategy. They
are no longer content with the robberies, hi-jacking, rocket attacks
and roadblocks that have formed the standard method of disruption since
the eyes of the West turned towards Iraq. They have now adapted a new
tactic: execution.
The international community
was not shocked by the first menacing news that filtered up to Kabul
from the lawless south during our early hours in the town: the killing
of two coalition soldiers. They were part of a platoon driving along
the main road from Kandahar to Herat. A group of motorcyclists ranged
up alongside their convoy, waved in friendly fashion, suddenly produced
machine guns, opened fire and sped away. This was seen as unfortunate,
but merely another deadly moment in the merciless private war the Americans
are fighting against terror. The next news from the south, a day or
two later, was not so readily dismissed. Bandits held up a convoy moving
through the province of Oruzgan, just north of Kandahar. They went through
each vehicle, robbing those inside but leaving them unharmed. At length
they found an 'international', Ricardo Munguia, an El Salvadorean Red
Cross worker.
Munguia was hustled out of
his car. The bandit commander used his satellite telephone to speak
to an unknown third party, thought to be in Pakistan. The moment the
call finished, Munguia was thrown into a roadside ditch, and shot. What
gives this wretched episode extra poignancy is the fact that the bandit
commander's life had been saved by the Red Cross a year earlier.
A few days later the same
fate met a stray Italian motorcyclist, apparently on an eccentric private
journey through the south. These killings, and others, have appalled
Afghanistan's international community. They have been followed by warnings
from Taliban leaders that all 'internationals' will be targeted. The
UN immediately placed a blanket ban on travel through much of the south,
while several aid organizations pulled out completely from Kandahar
and adjacent areas. The new mood of jittery nervousness may well have
been behind the accidental killing of three Afghan soldiers by US embassy
guards in a friendly fire incident last week.
The Taliban exudes confidence.
In February its leader Mullah Omar - like Osama bin Laden, coalition
forces have never flushed him out - issued his first defiant message
since the fall of his government in December 2001, calling on Afghans
'to rise up and use your sword against infidels and their puppets'.
Slogans such as these are now secretly distributed in propaganda flyers
through Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, in southern cities and sometimes
in Kabul itself.
In March, Gulbuddin Hetmatyar,
now a close ally of bin Laden and high on the FBI's 'most wanted' list,
issued a warning blast from his hide-out. He denounced Afghanistan's
pro-Western President Hamid Karzai as the 'showboy of the US', and declared
that the Americans would be 'reduced to rubble'. Hetmatyar's vainglorious
pronouncement contained a typical Afghan irony. Back in the 1980s, during
the long Mujahideen struggle against the Russians, he was the CIA's
warlord of choice and lavishly supplied with US cash and military hardware.
Eighteen months have now
passed since the West made a series of unequivocal promises to Afghanistan.
As invasion loomed before the Labour conference in 2001, Tony Blair
promised: 'We will not walk away from Afghanistan, as the outside world
has done so many times before.'
The following month the Prime
Minister told Parliament that he supported 'an inclusive, democratic
political structure' for the country. Last month, during the Iraq war,
Britain and America held up Afghanistan as the model for the elimination
of a rogue state.
As British and coalition
forces closed into Baghdad, documentary filmmaker Paul Yule and I flew
into Kabul for Channel 4. We wanted to find out whether Britain and
the West are keeping the pledges we made. We wanted to find out whether
Afghanistan is on course for the secure and prosperous future promised
by Tony Blair, or whether it is heading back into the horror and barbarism
of the past 25 years, which has killed 1 million Afghans and spawned
the terror movement that struck at New York on 11 September. To find
out we visited warlords, ranged out far beyond Kabul, spoke to soldiers,
policemen, farmers, refugees, aid-workers and diplomats. First we visited
acting President Karzai in the presidential palace.
Karzai is one of the most
protected men in the world. We have to pass through five heavily guarded
checkpoints before reaching the palace. Opposite the formal entrance
is a large yellowish office block: it houses the CIA. Even in the tranquil
courtyard outside the palace, machine-gun toting American guards wearing
body armour and slacks stand at every 50 paces. Hetmatyar likes to gibe
that Karzai 'does not trust Afghan guards'. But say what you will about
Karzai, he is a brave man, subject to constant assassination plots.
When I ask him about them, he brushes them aside as 'just part of life'.
We interviewed the interim
President on the day Baghdad fell. Karzai is tall, good-looking and
articulate. He dresses in immaculately pressed shalwar kameez and waistcoat
- sheer Afghan chic. The awesome task of creating a modern, democratic
Afghan state - and in the process turning 3,000 years of historical
development on its head - devolves on him. He is a friend of the West,
and that is what makes his criticisms, when they come, so much more
devastating. I ask him whether the $5 billion pledged to Afghanistan
at the Tokyo donors' conference of 2002 was enough to rebuild his country.
'Definitely not,' says Karzai. 'We believe Afghanistan needs $15-20bn
to reach the stage we were in 1979.'
He complains, too, that the
money has gone to the wrong places. Rather than make over funds to Karzai's
central government, Western donors have preferred to act through outside
agencies. 'Last year,' says Karzai, 'we had no control over how this
money was spent.' He warns that this lack of trust 'does weaken the
presence of the central government in the provinces of Afghanistan'.
It is hard to disagree. Even
the niggardly World Bank accepts that Afghan reconstruction requires
$10bn rather than the $5bn made available at Tokyo, while US Senator
Joseph Biden argues that $20bn would be nearer the mark. Earlier this
year the aid organization Care International produced a devastating
study which contrasted Afghanistan to other post-conflict zones. In
a table of aid per person donated by the West, Bosnia came up top, receiving
$326 per head. Kosovans received an average $288 while citizens of East
Timor got $195 each. Afghans are scheduled to receive just $42 per head
over the next five years. This is despite the fact that Afghanistan
is almost, as Karzai says, 'the poorest country in the world' and in
a far worse state than either Bosnia or Kosovo.
Take roads. After 23 years
of war Afghanistan barely has any. The bandit-infested journey between
Herat and Kandahar - once one of the world's great trading routes -
takes on average 17 hours today, requiring a perilous overnight stay
at a local town or village. Back in the 1970s it lasted a carefree six
hours. There are no meaningful plans to rebuild this vital route.
So far donor countries have
committed just $300m to road-building in all Afghanistan, by coincidence
exactly the same amount of money as is being spent on reconstructing
the US embassy in Kabul. Much of that $300m is being spent on building
an 80km stab of road south from Kabul towards Kandahar. The contractor
is Bechtel, the US construction giant whose Kabul representative says
that 1km of road costs almost $400,000 to build in Afghanistan's hostile
environment. That means that more than $1bn is required just to recreate
the 3,600km main ring road linking the country's main cities: Mazar,
Herat and Kabul. That money is not forthcoming, let alone the cash needed
to pave over the numerous smaller roads.
Nor will the West put in
the resources to provide safety. There are a number of different security
organizations, each with distinct and contradictory objectives. Some
11,000 US troops, mainly Special Forces, still prosecute the war against
terror. This is now an unending conflict, with echoes of Vietnam, fought
in the untracked wasteland of the southern mountains and around the
Pakistan border. But its aim is emphatically not the protection of the
population at large. General security is the responsibility of the International
Security Assistance Force. But Isaf confines its peacekeeping to Kabul,
and has repeatedly turned down requests from President Karzai to stretch
its tentacles around the country. Currently manned by Spanish and Italian
troops, Isaf's local nickname is the international shopping-a-lot force.
Karzai's pressure for countrywide
security has been urgently supported by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special
representative in Afghanistan. Brahimi told us that even a few thousand
troops, placed at key trouble spots around the country, would have prevented
the lawlessness that drags down the reconstruction operation. 'If we
had had this kind of support,' he claimed, 'the Afghans would have been
able to look after themselves after one or two years.'
Once again, statistics highlight
the staggering scale of the Western betrayal. In Bosnia there was one
peacekeeper for every 113 people, in East Timor every 66, in Kosovo
every 48. There is one Isaf soldier for every 5,380 Afghans. Without
an international security presence the Afghan countryside has fallen
back into the hands of the warlords and their militias, conservatively
estimated at some 200,000 strong. The international presence is feebly
trying to counter-balance the power of the warlords by building up the
central government security framework. So far those attempts have been
at worst disastrous and at best meaningless.
The rudiments of a police
force now exist, supposedly being trained by Germans. We visited the
District Four police HQ in central Kabul. Downstairs a young Bavarian
with a wispy beard studied papers at his desk. Upstairs the local police
chief, a gnarled veteran of the Mujahideen wars against Russia, offered
green tea and almond sweets and spoke of his despair that there was
no money to pay his officers.
He spelt out the consequences
of this neglect: 'There's a proverb in our country that a hungry stomach
doesn't know any logic or any reason. So since he is hungry, he's collaborating
with criminals.'
One rainy morning we traveled
to District Fourteen, an outer suburb of Kabul where Afghanistan's underclass,
the Hezzara tribe, gather together for mutual protection. To them the
local police HQ was simply a place of terror. The Hezzaras told us how
the police had not even attempted to solve any of the 20 murders that
had taken place over the past few months. They were certain that police
officers were behind a spate of recent burglaries. There were claims
that some policemen were really agents for a powerful local warlord,
and exacting revenge on the Hezzara people for being on the wrong side
during the Kabul wars.
This inability to pay the
police reflects a wider problem. There is no money for the civil service,
so government officials too are forced into corruption. President Karzai
is a brave man. But he is facing intractable problems, few of which
are of his own making. The West's refusal to give adequate financial
aid or security has castrated the President: it means that he has little
direct authority outside Kabul. The remainder of the country is in the
hands of warlords and local commanders. Gul Agha Shirzai is dominant
in the Kandahar area, Generals Dostum and Atta in the north, and in
the west Amir Ishmael Khan of Herat.
Our plan was to drive from
Kabul to Herat to visit Khan. But all security experts advised against,
so reluctantly we flew. On arrival we found Ishmael Khan hard at work.
He was sitting at a small table in his Governor's Hall ministering to
his people. They came up to him one by one, and were invited to sit
next to their warlord. He listened intently, brow furrowed, as he took
in their problems. One woman needed assistance to set up a workshop:
he ordered her to be given some money.
Another woman, the widow
of one of his Mujahideen heroes, was at her wits' end because the hospital
would not admit her sick son. Khan called the hospital personally to
secure admittance. Apart from the armed guards with machine guns who
surrounded the hall, it was a scene that could have come straight from
the Bible. The warlord was dressed in white robes and gray headdress.
He is a small man, with a face that has seen and experienced everything.
Watching him, you realize how a successful medieval English monarch
must have looked. He fought against the Russians, and then the Taliban,
who held him prisoner for three-and-a-half years before he sought exile
in Iran. He came back to claim the governorship after the US invasion
of Afghanistan.
From Herat he pays nominal
fealty to Hamid Karzai - a portrait of the President hangs in his office
- but in practice he runs his own fiefdom. Ishmael Khan's well-equipped
private militia, estimated at some 50,000 strong, easily outnumbers
the 4,000 soldiers in the national army. He runs his own schools, hospitals
and public parks. He finances it all by customs imposts taken at the
Iranian border worth up to $800,000 a day. Practically none gets passed
back to a despairing Karzai. The depth of the problem is so bad that
last week Karzai threatened resignation unless warlords such as Khan
start to pass their revenues back to the central treasury.
Ishmael Khan plays a delicate
political game. In the west neighboring Iran tries to suck him into
its sphere of influence, while the central government tries to claim
him from Kabul. He has developed his own doctrine of Islamic rule, but
he is a moderate compared to the Taliban. We joined Khan on a Friday
morning progress through some country villages. Not only did he open
a girls' school - the Taliban banned girls' education - but at the end
he gave a stern lecture to his warriors about the benefits of educating
women.
Western human rights groups
condemn him - a Human Rights Watch report recently claimed that single
women who stray into his public parks are vulnerable to crude virginity
tests. We found it impossible to verify these reports in Herat. Opposition
figures whom we met were literally quivering with fear, so much so that
they were scarcely able to speak. In at least one case they were followed
by the secret police. Recently a human rights group set up an office
in Herat. Ishmael Khan's chief of police beat one of the guests, a journalist,
unconscious at the launch. The journalist is now in exile in Iran, and
in fear of his life.
While we were in Herat the
same chief of police launched another thuggish personal attack, this
time on a doctor who refused to allow him to commandeer one of Herat
hospital's two ambulances for his private use.
But there is no doubt that
Khan is a popular and successful ruler of his own people. He is a more
attractive figure than most warlords. But he, and others like him, do
pose a giant challenge to the modernizing project upon which Karzai
and his British and American backers are engaged. A centralized state
cannot function without the revenues which Khan withholds. It is impossible
to establish law and order while private armies flourish.
Karzai knows that one part
of the solution is the Afghanistan National Army. 'If you want a better
Afghanistan,' insists Karzai, 'a peaceful Afghanistan, a stable Afghanistan,
we must have a national army. The ambition is that we should have a
70,000-strong force, professional, well-trained, well-equipped, well-paid
and mobile.' That ambition is a long way from being realized. Currently,
it is just 4,000 strong. It has been plagued by desertions as recruits
slough off back to their homes, though instructors insist that this
retention problem is improving.
Many of the new entrants
into the ANA are battle-hardened Mujahideen with embedded tribal loyalties:
the art is creating a national allegiance. But progress is being made.
We watched a platoon from the Royal Anglians instructing trainee NCOs
at a military base outside Kabul. There was a palpable esprit de corps.
I asked Ghulam Farook, a Pashtun from Wardak, whether he would fight
against his fellow tribesman. 'I have to work for my country,' he replied.
'My country has rights on me. If the enemies of peace and my country
are my brother I am going to fight against him.'
Building an army is one thing:
even more complex is destroying the militias. We attended the signing
of the historic demilitarization agreement, overseen by Brahimi in the
UN compound. The aim is to disarm 100,000 militiamen within a year.
Some will be absorbed into the army, others found jobs. The mechanics
of the scheme are simple. Troops hand over their rifles, and a certificate
from their warlord, in return for a sum of money. Administrators of
the scheme have not decided how much. 'One thing is certain,' says a
UN official dryly. 'It has to be less than a rifle costs on the open
market.'
The scheme is fraught with
problems. Marshall Fahim, Karzai's Defense Minister and a powerful warlord
in his own right, failed to attend the signing ceremony amid rumors
of sharp disputes.
There are fears among the
Pashtuns in the south that the scheme is merely a device by the Northern
Alliance to rob them of their weapons. No one will say when the attempt
to disarm Ishmael Khan will be made. Publicly Khan supports the scheme,
but privately is said to be bitterly opposed.
But that is not the biggest
problem. Out in the provinces the US army continues to arm and to pay
the warlords who help them in their battle against al-Qaeda. Even as
Hamid Karzai battles to establish his national army, he is being undermined
by his allies. Hopelessly under-funded, without the security he pleads
for, crippled even by his American backers, the Afghan President is
perilously isolated. He, and Afghanistan, are being daily betrayed by
Britain, America and the West.
(Peter Oborne's documentary
Afghanistan: Here's One We Invaded Earlier will be shown on London's
Channel 4 on Saturday 31 May.)