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| Afghanistan |
| Fisk on the Loya Jirga |
| 2002-06-11 |
| By Robert ("Beat me! Whip me! Call me an infidel dog!") Fisk Washington wants the loya jirga to succeed. No! Who told you that? True, far too many of its pliant warlords – the Pashtun and Tajik gangsters whom the Americans paid in thousands of dollars for their sometimes loyal alliance against Osama Bin Laden – have been trying to bribe and bamboozle their own candidates into power once they realised that the "grand assembly" of Afghans would actually be held today. And true, there has been intimidation and delegates murdered. Yup. By all parties. It's an old Afghan sport, kind of like buzkashi, only they use politicians instead of a goat... But a successful interim government – whatever its chances of producing fair parliamentary elections – is vital for the United States. Firstly, it will allow President Bush, despite his failure to capture either Mr Bin Laden or the Pimpernel-like Mullah Omar, to claim that America has fulfilled its promise to bring "democracy" to Afghanistan. Don't recall that we ever promised to bring "democracy," with or without the quotes, to Afghanistan. I think "freedom" was the word used. Freedom may or may not equate to personal liberty for the Afghans; that's their own lookout. It's their country, not ours. We did manage to free them from an occupying army of Arabs, Paks and Chechens, and in the process it was necessary to smash the Taliban. If the new guys want to go back to public executions as the halftime show at football games, that's their privilege, whether we approve or not. While the bin Laden and Mullah Omar corpses would be nice, breaking their organizations is the important part. When you come right down to it, the vision of Mullah Omar riding off into the sunset on a motorcycle was actually priceless, and Binny will soon conk out from natural causes. Oh, and we did knock off Mohammad Atef, Juma Namangani, and a few others, and of course we did capture Abu Zubaydah. Not too bad, I'd say. Secondly – and more importantly – because it is America's ticket out of the country. As an article in the Wall Street Journal, the President's best friend in his "war on terror", put it last week, nation-building "certainly beats keeping crack [sic] US troops on the Afghan-Pakistan border for the next 10 to 15 years". Who told you we wanted to be an occupying power? Repeat after me: "It's-their-country-and-we're-only-there-to-kill-al-Qaeda." But even if the democrats and the killers and murderers of Afghanistan – let us not be squeamish about some of the "delegates" – bring off their tribal rites today, it's by no means certain that Afghanistan's central authority will be able to do any more than they have already: rule the streets of Kabul while regional warlords – including one of their own vice-ministers – battle with rival mafiosi in the rest of the country. That's probably true. But the Loya Jirga, which seems kind of like an old Latin senatus or maybe a very early form of a parliament — say, sometime around the magna carta — is what the Afghans do and have been doing for a few hundred years. It'll lend a bit of legitimacy to the Karzai regime. Some of the warlords are making the transition to politicians, and the most ignorant and brutal will eventually die out, probably with a little help from the spankin' new national army taking shape. Holding up the ideal and complaining it's not met is a pretty cheap argument. Try taking what they had before — Hekmatyar fighting with Masood and Rabbani, followed by Mullah Omar — and contrasting it with what they have now, and things look positively ducky. Effective central governments don't spring into being full-blown; they build from a base, and they build incrementally. We're trying to set up that base, and no, there aren't any guarantees. Hamid Karzai, the head of the present interim government, has only one popular mandate in Afghanistan. It doesn't come from the thugs of the Northern Alliance who "liberated" Kabul from the Taliban last November. Nor does it come from his own Pashtun people, with whom his prestige has rested only upon his personal integrity. Hmmm... What other candidates are there? Lessee, here... There's Rabbani, who held the Northern Alliance together and moved aside at the very moment his men were taking Kabul. He sour-graped it, and he's still going to be looking out for his own interests, but he's preferable to Hekmatyar, who was first a Pak stooge and then an Iranian stooge. The Talibs were a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pak ISI. Rasool Sayyaf is owned and operated by the Saudis. Karzai represents a compromise candidate, and the personal integrity Fisk so casually dismisses is the only reason he has support. He's shown his bravery by going into Afghanistan on the heels of Abdul Haq, who was pretty thoroughly and brutally hung just days before. The Talibs made a try at hanging Karzai, too, lest we forget, and on the very day he was named to head the interim government almost bought a very small farm in a friendly fire incident. Nor has he done a bad job as an administrator, within the constraints he was presented. It comes from his friends in the West, those who advised him, dressed him in his stunning green robes and paid for his advancement. It comes from those Western nations – stand up, all of us – who have promised to fund, through him, the regeneration of Afghanistan. The Afghans have a pretty depleted set of tax rolls right now. Should we let them starve? Should we let them collapse back into anarchy? Will that be better for them? Will it be better for us? The gang leaders of Afghanistan have agreed to let Mr Karzai remain leader of the next interim government. But at present, those same mafia bosses are running many of the major cities of Afghanistan. Humanitarian organisations and charities are, in many cases, still forced to funnel their aid through these ruthless men, in Mazar-i-Sharif, in Nangahar province, in Khost. Voters in the forthcoming elections know that their humanitarian aid comes via the warlords. When has it been different? The Taliban did the same daggone thing, only worse. Shucks, they even claimed to be burning the food drops we were making and laying So who will they vote for in parliamentary elections? Mr Karzai is trying to form the country's first non-sectarian political group – allegedly with the brother of Ahmed Shah Masood, the Tajik leader murdered two days before the 11 September atrocities in the United States. And loya jirgas have their uses. While by no means pliant, the British used them to maintain their control of Afghanistan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The wretched President Nadjibullah – he who was emasculated and then strangled by the Taliban in 1996 – persuaded two loya jirgas to keep him in power. It would seem to make sense to plan for the future, wouldn't it? Or should they just wait for events to overtake them? So with American money behind him, Mr Karzai may have a good chance to go on leading Afghanistan – at least for the moment. So what's all this mean, Bob? Bitch, moan, rant, rave, and toss your charges of corruption and brutality. Any suggestions for doing things differently? Doing them better? Wouldn't it be a good thing if Afghanistan, eight months after the bombing started, seven months after Kabul fell, six months after Mullah Omar and Binny headed for the hills, begins turning into the sort of place people want to live? Or am I missing something? |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #3 _Him_ again. How much abuse can one man take? I note that today's screed was peculiarly pointless, even for Fisk; perhaps he suffered a worse concussion in that beating than he knew previously and it's going active on him. And the problem that you noted in your last comment - his bitching, moaning and whining, but not offering an alternative - is not peculiar to him, but very much characteristic of his genre of thumb-sucking pundit. |
| Posted by: Joe 2002-06-11 15:43:24 |
| #2 (Tap-tap-tap!) Dang! I think my sympathy meter's still busted. It's reading zero. Guess jihad isn't what it's cracked up to be... |
| Posted by: Fred 2002-06-11 13:54:33 |
| #1 Reading though this I wondered what sort of lunatic Fred dredged up to top off the day's posts. After pulling up the original, I realised that I shouldn't have wondered at all. Did you dig the picture of el Fisk at Mazar i Sharif to the right bottom? |
| Posted by: Tom Roberts 2002-06-11 13:45:52 |
