Afghan Mess Predictable

The deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan, where parallels are now being drawn with the chaos in Iraq, can be traced to critical failures by the Bush Administration following “Operation Enduring Freedom,” the codename for the invasion of the country in October 2001.
From the moment the White House decided to take down the ruling Taliban and destroy Al Qaeda, too much reliance was placed on overwhelming air power, small Special Forces Units and CIA operatives weighed down with tens of millions of dollars to buy Afghan warlords so their militiamen could do most of the fighting. The warlords, who were happy to take the CIA dollars and send their militias into battle against Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban, were simply motivated by greed. Many of them had poor human rights records and had made their wealth through the heroin trade and connections to international crime syndicates.
A case in point was General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Northern Alliance leader, whose forces took the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-e-Sharif. It was said of Dostum, he had a face for every eventuality. An Uzbek by birth, he stoill charges a fee for heroin smuggled across the Afghan border into Uzbekistan, He once fought for the Soviets in northern Afghanistan in the 1980s but switched sides when he realized a Soviet defeat was imminent. He then joined the Mujihadeen to fight the Soviets and later changed sides again to fight the Mujihadeen. Today, he controls a large slice of Afghanistan and is just as undependable as most of the warlords who run the country. In 2003, evidence emerged that the heroin trade had tripled and that Dostum was protecting heroin growers in his region and levying a fee on heroin trafficked through the territory he controlled. It wasn’t until 2005 that the Pentagon admitted to the massive growth in heroin supplies.
The use of men like Dostum at the outset of the Afghan invasion signaled a Pentagon policy that the war against the Taliban could be handled by well-paid warlords and their militias. Pentagon analysts believed that would avoid a repeat of the Soviet strategy of committing large numbers of infantry forces. While it may have seemed like a good political move by the Bush administration in the autumn of 2001, it became part of an ongoing folly that led to Al Qaeda surviving the US invasion of Afghanistan and to the Taliban re-grouping.
To grasp how US policymakers got it so badly wrong, one only has to look at the events in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan in December 2001, just of two months after the invasion. At that time, Osama Bin Laden, his inner circle, and as many as 5,000 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, were holed up in caves. Instead of sending in a large US force to destroy them, the Pentagon relied on Afghan fighters, backed up by a small contingent of US Special Forces and American air power.
From the outset, Pentagon specialists underestimated the numbers of insurgents in Tora Bora and were reluctant to risk the lives of US marines or rangers by mounting a ground assault. Those same experts did not understand that Afghan fighters were just as likely to take bribes from Al Qaeda and the Taliban as they w ere from the CIA and Pentagon. That was the last time Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts were known because he and all the other insurgents in Tora Bora eventually melted into the mountains bordering Pakistan, and into tribal regions of that country. There were reports Bin Laden bribed the same Afghans the CIA had paid to find and kill him.
If lessons should have been learned from the Tora Bora debacle they were not because another operation codenamed “Anaconda” was launched in March 2002 and it was a failure too. This time, Taliban and Al Qaeda were holed up in Shahi-Kot, mountains southeast of Gardez and insufficient ground pressure was applied to force them into the open. Worse still, the Pakistani military failed to seal the border and hundreds of Taliban fled into tribal areas of Pakistan.
The US reliance on warlords and their militias to build a nation was a dangerous policy which has contributed to the mess the country is in today. All the White House talk about an emerging democracy has been part of a fiction that has obscured a terrible reality. The Taliban is back in business in a big way, construction projects have been abandoned across the country, the heroin trade has has expanded, women have fewer rights than they had following the downfall of the Taliban, corruption is widespread, hundreds of schools have been burned down and the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai is ruling the capital, Kabul, but not the country.
This year in an effort to build a power base he appointed new police chiefs, most of whom had records for humans rights violations and drugs trafficking. He did deals with warlords and even talked about arming militias to fight the Taliban. The prospect of arming even more militias angered Japan and some European nations who argued that it was time to take the gun out of Afghan politics.
Recently reports surfaced that the CIA was continuing to use hard cash to buy the allegiances of warlords. That was hardly surprising because, at the beginning of this year, CIA operatives were seen in villages handing out dollars to buy local support. Afghans queued up to get the money and were required to sign for it. Some were unable to write and were allowed to "make their mark." A source who observed this said it the Afghans saw it as a wonderful opporunity to get a free handout.
One of the major factors in the failure of US policy in Afghanistan was that months into the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Pentagon and White House shifted their focus to Iraq. It is now clear the Bush Administration was unwilling to commit a lot of men and materiel to Afghanistan because it was determined to invade Iraq. More significant, by early 2002, the White House naively believed the Taliban had been defeated and it was only be a matter of time before Osama Bin Laden and what was left of Al Qaeda were rounded up. The euphoria in the White House about the quick take down of the Taliban was best illustrated by the First Lady, Laura Bush, who declared that with the Taliban gone Afghan women had been emancipated
Well, now in the autumn of 2006 the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has news for Mrs. Bush. Most Afghan women are being forced to wear burqas in public and more than half the female population has suffered physical abuse. Over 60% of Afghan marriages are forced and the majority of marriages involve girls younger than 16. As many as 75% of tuberculosis fatalities are female and 85% of women are illiterate. On September 25, a renowned women’s rights advocate, Safia Amajan, was shot dead by the Taliban, following several death threats. She had requested personal protection from the Karzai government and was denied it. Her death illustrated the lawlessness that is all pervasive in a country the Bush administration continues to claim is an emerging democracy – a success story in the words of President Bush.