Afghanistan: The American Experience (New York Review)

Amy Hertz, Huffington Post: Two major powers have struggled for control of Afghanistan over the last few decades, The Soviet Union and the US. Facing a surge in troops in Afghanistan, we are turning to the archives of The New York Review of Books to locate ourselves in history, understand the context of the current American war. What should the US course of action be?

From the article, "The Making of Afghanistan", by Pankaj Mishra, November 15, 2001

It is hard to imagine now, but for students at Kabul University, 1968 was no less a hectic year than it was for students at Columbia, Berkeley, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. A king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, had been presiding over the many ethnic and tribal enclaves of Afghanistan since 1933. But he knew enough of the world elsewhere to attempt, cautiously, a few liberal reforms in his capital city, Kabul. The university had been set up in 1946; a liberal constitution was introduced in 1964; the press was technically free; women ran for public office in 1965. By the Sixties, many students and teachers had traveled abroad; and new ideas about how to organize the state and society had come to the sons of peasants and nomads and artisans from their foreign or foreign-educated teachers.

In the somewhat rarefied world of modernizing Kabul, where women were allowed to appear without the veil in 1959, communism and radical Islam attracted almost an equal number of believers: to these impatient men, the great Afghan countryside with its antique ways appeared ready for revolution. It was from this fledgling intelligentsia in Kabul that almost all of the crucial political figures of the next three decades emerged.

Less than five years after 1968, King Zahir Shah was deposed in a military coup by his cousin, the ambitious former prime minister Mohammad Daoud.[1] Daoud initially sought help from the Communists, whose influence in the army and bureaucracy had grown rapidly since the 1960s: together, they went after the radical Islamists, many of whom were imprisoned or murdered for ideological reasons. But when Daoud, wary of the increasing power of the Communists, tried to get rid of them, he was in turn overthrown and killed. In April 1978, the Communists--themselves divided, confusingly, into two factions, Khalq and Parcham, that roughly corresponded to the rural-urban divide in Afghanistan--assumed full control of the government in Kabul, and in their hurry to eliminate all potential opposition to their program of land redistribution and indoctrination--an attempt, really, to create a Communist society virtually overnight--inaugurated what two decades later still looks like an ongoing process: the brutalization and destruction of Afghanistan. (Read the rest of the article.)

From "The Rise of Bin Laden", by Ahmed Rashid, May 27, 2004

"Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001" by Steve Coll (Penguin)

As millions of people around the world gathered in front of their TV sets in March and April to observe the public hearings held by the independent commission investigating the September 11 attacks, the one name that seemed to hover over the room was Osama bin Laden. While they watched, one senior official after another from the Clinton or Bush administrations spoke of the numerous attempts by the CIA before September 11 to capture or kill him.

Some of the stories of their efforts to capture bin Laden had already been told. Those who had followed recent accounts of the work of US intelligence knew that the Clinton administration would not give an order to kill him in February 1999, when he was at a hunting camp in southern Afghanistan with a group of Arab princes. They also knew that the CIA hired both an Afghan mercenary group to kidnap him from an al-Qaeda farm in Kandahar in Afghanistan and a group of Pakistani commandos to do the same. Some of the listening public probably knew as much as the members of the commission.

Among the best informed were those who had read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, a remarkable book published a few weeks before the public hearings began, which got much attention among people who follow intelligence matters, although nothing like the publicity given shortly afterward to Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies.[1] Clarke, after all, was one of the most powerful experts on terrorism in the White House. That he would openly say that the administration he once worked for was fighting the wrong war was wholly unexpected. Steve Coll's background is quite different. He was a reporter in Afghanistan, and he has been the managing editor of The Washington Post since 1998. (Read the rest of the article.)

From "The Real Afghanistan," by Pankaj Mishra, March 10, 2005

Much of Kabul is built of mud. And when it rained before last Christmas--relieving a long and severe drought--the whole city seemed to melt. The piles of sludge on its unpaved lanes rose, as though in a slow-moving tide, until it spattered everything: the big white Land Cruisers of aid agencies and Afghan ministers, the beat-up yellow taxis, the bombed-out palaces of western Kabul and the bullet-pocked huts on steep hills, the fortified foreign embassies and UN offices, and even the high billboards exhorting Afghans, in idiosyncratic English, to "national reconciliation and peace."

Despite the rain and cold, the bazaars were crowded. Shopkeepers representing almost all of Afghanistan's ethnic groups--Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Turkmens--hawked oranges, carpets, Chinese-made windbreakers, and electronic goods, while beggars--mostly disabled children and widows in burkas--squatted beside the open sewers and tugged at the wide trousers of passing men.

It was strange to find no white faces in these crowds. Even in the modern part of Kabul, where thousands of Europeans and Americans--mostly soldiers, diplomats, aid workers, and businessmen--live, the streets were empty. Afghan guards with Kalashnikovs stood in front of the iron gates set in high concrete walls topped with barbed wire. The gates occasionally opened to reveal a new or renovated mansion, and to release or swallow a Land Cruiser with tinted windows.

To be a foreigner in Afghanistan, it seemed, was to move from one protected enclave to another. An Indian journalist I met soon after arriving in Kabul told me that security had deteriorated soon after the presidential election in October, which the Taliban had failed to disrupt, and which Hamid Karzai had won convincingly. That same month a suicide bomber, apparently from the Taliban, had killed an American woman and injured three European soldiers at a shopping district a few yards away from my hotel. The Indian journalist himself seemed lonely, frustrated by the restrictions on both his travel and social life. (Read the rest of the article.)

From "Pakistan in Peril", by William Dalrymple, February 12, 2009

"Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia", by Ahmed Rashid (Viking)

Lahore, Pakistan

The relative calm in Iraq in recent months, combined with the drama of the US elections, has managed to distract attention from the catastrophe that is rapidly overwhelming Western interests in the part of the world that always should have been the focus of America's response to September 11: the al-Qaeda and Taliban heartlands on either side of the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The situation here could hardly be more grim. The Taliban have reorganized, advanced out of their borderland safe havens, and are now massing at the gates of Kabul, threatening to surround and throttle the capital, much as the US-backed Mujahideen once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late Eighties. Like the rerun of an old movie, all journeys out of the Afghan capital are once again confined to tanks, armored cars, and helicopters. Members of the Taliban already control over 70 percent of the country, up from just over 50 percent in November 2007, where they collect taxes, enforce Sharia law, and dispense their usual rough justice; but they do succeed, to some extent, in containing the wave of crime and corruption that has marked Hamid Karzai's rule. This has become one of the principal reasons for their growing popularity, and every month their sphere of influence increases.

The blowback from the Afghan conflict in Pakistan is more serious still. In less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari's new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notoriously corrupt playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place under his watch has amazed almost all observers.

Across much of the North-West Frontier Province--around a fifth of Pakistan--women have now been forced to wear the burqa, music has been silenced, barbershops are forbidden to shave beards, and over 140 girls' schools have been blown up or burned down. In the provincial capital of Peshawar, a significant proportion of the city's elite, along with its musicians, have now decamped to the relatively safe and tolerant confines of Lahore and Karachi. Meanwhile tens of thousands of ordinary people from the surrounding hills of the semiautonomous tribal belt--the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) that run along the Afghan border--have fled from the conflict zones blasted by missiles from unmanned American Predator drones and strafed by Pakistani helicopter gunships to the tent camps now ringing Peshawar. (See map, read the rest of the article.)

Read more at the New York Review of Books.