Ten years on and counting

Ten years after the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, there appears no satisfactory end in sight to the longest war the US has been engaged in in its history. The main justification for the war was denial of safe havens to al Qaeda by their hosts, the Afghan Taliban, which allowed the former to plan and perpetrate 9/11. To achieve that, the US, impatient with Taliban prevarication on the demand to hand over Osama bin Laden, unleashed its immense military might to demolish the Taliban regime and install in its place an anti-Taliban alliance with Hamid Karzai at its head. Given Afghan history and character, it was always risky to expect a regime imposed by foreign bayonets to find ready acceptance amongst the Afghan people, even if large numbers amongst them breathed a sigh of relief at seeing the back of the antediluvian Taliban. Ten years on, the balance sheet of the US/Nato occupation is being totted up, with mixed results at best.

First, the pluses. There is no doubt that the rolling back of the most extreme Taliban strictures against women, the minorities, culture, etc, have provided Afghans with badly needed breathing room and the hope of a revival of Afghan traditions and culture dearly beloved of the people of that country. In an interview, President Karzai has recounted the ‘achievements’ of his regime over the last ten years in the fields of healthcare, education, and the economy. There is no doubt that in the first two of these, quantitative growth and outreach has been pretty spectacular. Most Afghans today can access healthcare and education, especially the female gender, even though experts decry the poor standards attending these services. Afghanistan’s finances still depend heavily on foreign aid, with one estimate showing that 80 percent of the country’s GDP still is owed to foreign sources. President Karzai seems to be relying on newly discovered reserves of minerals in the country, particularly some estimated $ 3 trillion worth of lithium, which could arguably transform the economy to the extent of being able to stand on its own feet. However, this will take time and, according to the British Ambassador to Kabul, William Patey, Afghanistan will require funds from abroad until at least 2025 just to stay afloat.

While it is difficult to count the pluses, the minuses come crowding forth. Even Karzai admitted in the same interview that his government and its international allies have failed to provide security for the Afghan people. For astute observers of the Afghan scene, this hardly comes as a surprise since the Afghans have proved time and again in their history their unmatched ability to fight a foreign occupier indefinitely until he tires and departs. And if they have the facility of safe havens in a neighbouring country, the result is predictable. According to the Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, that is where things stand today, leading him to predict that victory will be theirs in the end. The entire enterprise of regime change and rebuilding Afghanistan depended first and foremost on providing security, which Karzai thinks has been a failure and the ISAF command thinks is a work-in-progress with many bright spots. This year has seen increased boldness in the Taliban’s attacks in Kabul and the spread of Taliban influence in the north and east, even as the traditional stronghold of the south and southwest has yielded relative control by the ISAF forces. Security, like much else in Afghanistan, especially governance, presents a mixed picture at best.

Whatever the balance sheet of ten years of war may reveal or conceal, the fact remains that US President Obama’s optimism that the Afghan and Iraq wars are being ended responsibly and that al Qaeda is nearing its end after a decade of pursuit seems overly simplistic to the point of delusion. Al Qaeda may be hurt, but it is by no means down and out. The Taliban’s expected push to return to power once the foreign forces have departed and the Afghan security forces are all that stand between them and the prize plum of Kabul still lies in the future. There is little evidence that US hopes for a distancing of the Taliban from al Qaeda, a distancing that would open up the gates to a separate settlement with the Taliban that excluded any remaining ties with bin Laden’s successors have any reasonable chance of being fulfilled. If the Taliban return to power in Kabul, can al Qaeda be all that far behind?