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The Other "Good War:" Afghanistan
One Year Later
October 7, 2002
By Rahul Mahajan
As the full imperial dimensions of current
administration policy become clearer, helped along by the
recent promulgation of a new “national security”
policy that calls explicitly for a new imperialism based
on military dominance, opposition to the planned war on
Iraq is mounting across the globe (except in Congress, where
the Democratic leadership has once again sold out, ignoring
the overwhelming message sent by the huge grassroots mobilization
of recent weeks).
In the context of Iraq, it has become acceptable,
even respectable, to say that the emperor is aptly garbed
for a naked power grab. To this day, however, few are willing
to criticize the war in Afghanistan. In fact, some self-proclaimed
spokespeople for the antiwar movement have recently suggested
that the “left,” which is to say the peace movement,
the global justice movement, and most of the progressive
grassroots activists in the country, still handicaps itself
by its opposition to that war. The official story remains
that, whatever has come after, the war on Afghanistan remains
the one shining success in the “war on terrorism.”
One year later (the bombing started on October
7, 2001), many of the results are in, and it’s about
time for a critical look at some of those “successes.”
The war increased the threat of terrorism.
Last fall, those who were “prematurely antiwar”
predicted that it would. At the time, very few agreed; after
the sudden collapse of the Taliban and the stories about
Afghans welcoming their bombers with open arms, almost no
one did. More recently, the argument has found support from
a different quarter: the FBI and the CIA. According to the
June 16 New York Times, “Classified investigations
of the Qaeda threat now under way at the FBI and CIA have
concluded that the war in Afghanistan failed to diminish
the threat to the United States … Instead, the war
might have complicated counterterrorism efforts by dispersing
potential attackers across a wider geographic area.”
Further, middle-level al-Qaeda operatives
used the opportunity to strengthen contacts with other Islamist
groups in the region, thus increasing the pool from which
future terrorists will be drawn. The war allowed them to
draw other Islamist groups, hitherto focused on domestic
political questions, into the world of terrorist networks
committed to attacks on the United States. According to
one official quoted, “Al Qaeda at its core was really
a small group, even though thousands of people went through
their camps. What we're seeing now is a radical international
jihad that will be a potent force for many years to come.”
And, of course, the war didn’t result
in the apprehension of Osama bin Laden or others high in
the al-Qaeda network, who could possibly have been extradited
had the United States deigned to offer evidence to the Taliban
-- according to reports in the British press (Daily Telegraph,
October 4, 2001), an extradition deal had been worked out,
only to be quashed at the last minute by Pakistan’s
dictator Pervez Musharraf, presumably at the behest of the
White House, which didn’t want to lose its casus belli.
So, it seems, the war put an end to the best chance of catching
those high-level leaders.
Many innocents were killed. Initial concerns
about civilian casualties were generally dismissed amid
claims that the bombing of Afghanistan was the most restrained
and precise in history, Christopher Hitchens even accusing
U.S. forces of being “pedantic” in their restraint.
In fact, as in other recent U.S. bombing campaigns, the
initial narrow targeting was broadened as air defense was
destroyed. As the small store of pre-determined targets
was exhausted, the country was divided into “kill boxes”
where pilots were to attack “targets of opportunity.”
A policy of cavalierly attacking military or supposed military
targets right in the heart of heavily-populated areas was
part of the reason that, at a conservative estimate by the
Project for Defense Alternatives, the Afghanistan war killed
at least four times as many civilians per bomb as were killed
in the war on Yugoslavia. Although the difficulties of estimating
civilian casualties from the bombing are formidable (largely
because the U.S. government, with its customary indifference
to the effects of its wars, refuses to do a study), all
serious estimates conclude that over 1000 died -- recent
studies by the Guardian newspaper, reported on May 20, 2002,
indicate a possibility of up to 8000 actually killed by
the bombs.
These concerns quickly gave way to the much
graver threat of disruption of humanitarian aid. Over 7
million Afghans were directly dependent for survival on
aid, which was disrupted for September, October and part
of November first by the threat of bombing and then by the
bombing. The precipitous collapse of the Taliban in mid-November
meant that the United States stopped bombing most of the
country, so that aid deliveries by international organizations
were rapidly restored, narrowly averting a catastrophe.
That disruption did have noticeable effects, which have
finally been assessed: according to the same Guardian survey,
“As many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives
as an indirect consequence of the US intervention. They
too belong in any tally of the dead.”
The United States installed a puppet regime,
throwing democracy out the window. The “loya jirga,”
or grand council, that selected the current interim government
of Afghanitan, was peopled from the start with delegates
selected by the United States, mostly representatives of
the regional warlords, with a small sprinkling of Afghan
expatriates (mostly from the United States) and “technocrats”
to give it some aura of respectability. Representatives
from the 1.5-million-strong Watan Party, successor to the
PDPA (which ruled Afghanistan until 1992), were not allowed
into the jirga.
According to Omar Zakhilwal and Adeena Niazi,
delegates to the loya jirga, “We delegates were denied
anything more than a symbolic role in the selection process.
A small group of Northern Alliance chieftains decided everything
behind closed doors.” Since former monarch Zahir Shah,
the most popular candidate for interim president, was unsuitable
for U.S. interests, “the entire loya jirga was postponed
for almost two days while the former king was strong-armed
into renouncing any meaningful role in the government,”
they said. At that point, most delegates, aware that the
U.S.-backed warlords held all the military power and fearing
for their lives, silently went along.
Perhaps the high point was the sudden declaration
by U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad (former consultant
with Unocal) that Zahir Shah was stepping down -- something
that the octogenarian former king was apparently unable
to say for himself. After that, the confirmation of the
United States’s handpicked (likely in October or November
2001) candidate Hamid Karzai (former consultant with Unocal)
was swift and sure. And any lingering doubt about Karzai's
freedom of action should have been ended by the news that
U.S. Special Forces were acting as his praetorian guard.
The U.S. government has shown little concern
for the rights of women in Afghanistan. Given the Bush administration’s
lack of concern for women’s rights in the rest of the
known world, including the United States, this should, of
course, be no surprise. But the extent of this indifference
is striking. Notwithstanding the expressed commitment to
building infrastructure for women's education and health
care, both shamefully neglected under the Taliban, the Bush
administration has been so stingy as to block $134 million
in Afghan humanitarian aid, citing domestic economic problems
(the money is less than 50 cents per American). Of that,
$2.5 million was for the Ministry of Women's Affairs. Ritu
Sharma, president of the advocacy group Women's Edge, described
that $2.5 million, earmarked to build women’s centers
across Afghanistan, as a “question of life or death
for the ministry and Afghan women.” So far, the United
States has contributed a mere $120,000 to it -- about one-tenth
the cost of a single cruise missile.
The U.S. government has done little to alleviate
the extreme humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, let alone
to rebuild the country. To take one index, U.S. contributions
through UNICEF for Afghanistan have been less than a third
those of Japan -- even though it was the United States that
played a huge role in creating the crisis, through its decade-long
support for various mujahedin factions as well as through
the bombing campaign last fall. At the Tokyo conference
on reconstruction of Afghanistan in January 2002, a mere
$4.5 billion was pledged, a derisory $300 million of it
from the United States -- not nearly enough to address Afghanistan’s
needs. Driven largely by the perceived lack of concern from
the U.S. government, donor countries have in fact not even
followed through on these minuscule pledges. So shamefully
negligent has the United States been in fixing its mess
that today, as winter approaches, 6 million Afghans -- a
larger number than before Sept. 11, 2001 -- are once again
on the brink, dependent on humanitarian aid to get through
the next months.
On every test of justice and of pragmatism,
the war on Afghanistan fails. Worse, every one of these
aspects, from an increased threat of terrorism to large
numbers of civilian deaths to installation of a U.S.-controlled
puppet regime is due to play out again in the war on Iraq.
In fact, though it has been little noted, the sanctions
regime has made Iraqis dependent on centralized, government-distributed
food to survive and relief agencies have already expressed
their concerns about the potential for a humanitarian crisis
once war starts.
We, and the Iraqi people, can do without
any more “successes” in the war on terrorism.
Rahul Mahajan is the Green Party candidate
for Governor of Texas and a member of the Nowar Collective
(http://www.nowarcollective.com). His book “The
New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism” (http://www.monthlyreview.org/newcrusade.htm,
April 2002, Monthly Review Press) has been described as
“mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a handle
on the war on terrorism.” He is currently writing a
book called “The U.S. War Against Iraq”
for Seven Stories Press. More of his work can be found at
http://www.rahulmahajan.com
He can be reached at rahul@tao.ca
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