About a year ago, Afghanistan went through a turning point, and not a good one.  The country had been teetering between chaos and order ever since the day the Taliban fled Kabul. (Parenthetically, it wasn’t American bombardment that drove them out in 2002. but American diplomatic and financial pressure on Pakistan, which forced that country to stop supporting the Taliban.  Without money and guns from Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Taliban could not stand up to native Afghan forces because they were, in fact, merely a stalking horse for Pakistan–the cadre were young Afghans recruited out of the refugee camps, but the officials in Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence was pulling all the strings. A further parenthesis: if America had forced Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban earlier, as a number of Afghan leaders had pleaded, the Taliban would have toppled long before 9/11.)

In any case, the moment the Taliban fled, Afghanistan stood poised at the gates of hope and America had a golden opportunity to reverse anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world by resurrecting a devastated Muslim country without any strings attached. 

Instead, the United States launched its war in Iraq. Reconstruction aid to Afghanistan faltered.  The central government, which lacked the military power to impose its will on the countryside, now also lost the leverage that control of substantial aid money might have given it.  In the years that followed, the Karzai government did its best through diplomacy and horsetrading to give the country’s many conflicting factions and forces some stake in a new civil order and thus draw them into nation-building.  But at the same time, Pakistani agents, radical Jihadists from the Arab world, and other troublemaking outsiders, as well as jealous tribal chieftains, warlords left over from the previous twenty-three years of bloodshed, traditional rural clerics, and other “insiders,”  collaborated to undermine the emerging civil order.  This was not, mind you, a conspiracy hatched in some secret lair, but a spontaneous convergence of interests among many forces: each had something to lose from peace and each had something to gain from chaos. There is a hidden hand in politics much like the “hidden hand” Adam Smith famously discovered in the market.  Because of this hidden hand, people pursuing their own political self-interest can collaborate without speaking a word to one another

Some big-ticket money did come in. The road from Kabul to Kandahar was rebuilt, for example (but so hastily and shoddily that parts of it are already crumbling).  Fancy new houses rose from the rubble of Kabul’s bombed-out neighborhoods. And the city now has bars and brothels and a shopping mall. The infusion of foreign aid, however, has caused ruinous inflation without raising local incomes, and it has failed to promote any grassroots business development, because the countless small-time native entrepreneurs–Afghanistan was crawling with them in the early days after the Taliban fell–got no funding to pursue their little business schemes.  

Out in the countryside, where the soil is still heavily laced with land mines, peasants have found that they can at least hold body and soul together with the income they can squeeze from growing opium poppies.  Former warlords have quickly seen in this the opportunity to prosper as druglords. Former guerilla warriors, whose skills would be useless in a peaceful society, now can find work as enforcers for the drug lords. 

In short, Afghanistan has seen a race between chaos and order that broke out the day the Taliban fled Kabul.  In the last year or so, chaos has begun to gain the upper hand on order, I think, by pursuing several effective tactics. First came the assassination of aid workers in the south, which undermined foreign efforts to deliver reconstruction aid to this fiercely independent region. Then came the attacks on schools, which forced over 200 of them to shut down. Next,  anti-government forces began assassinating pro-government clerics, cutting off this means of co-opting the conservative masses.  And last but not least, Afghanistan began to see suicide bombings, a tactic never used by native Afghans even during the anti-Soviet war–these represent a backwash into Afghanistan from the catastrophe in Iraq. Over the last year, there have been more than a hundred such bombings in Afghanistan. 

American combat in Afghanistan officially ended on January 10, 2002, yet the United States has more troops stationed in the country now than it ever did–ever: about 20,000 give or take.   The media usually ascribes the mounting violence here to “the Taliban” but this is just a phrase and a dangerously deceptive one because it invites the idea that this whole problem could be solved by capturing or killing someone or a whole list of someones, or destroying their headquarters or disrupting their “command and control” capabilities, etc.  In fact, here as in Iraq–and as in the world as a whole–what we’re fighting is not an entity but a condition. 

 

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