The Other
"Good War"
Afghanistan One
Year Later
by Rahul Mahajan
Dissident Voice
October 7, 2002
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. His book, The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism, (Monthly Review Press, 2002), 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 on Iraq titled Axis of Lies:
Myths and Reality about the U.S. War on Iraq. His work is available at http://www.rahulmahajan.com Email: rahul@tao.ca