April 16, 2003

By Camille T. Taiara

AS THE LAST vestiges of Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime are destroyed and the Pentagon moves to install an occupying government in Iraq, there's something to be learned from how Afghanistan has fared after the fall of the Taliban.

In November 2001, Tahmeena Faryal of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan warned Bay Guardian readers of the perils of re-empowering Northern Alliance warlords with bad human rights records (see "Beneath the Burqa," 11/14/01). Today, Faryal's critique of the international community's experiment in Afghanistan seems prescient.

"The bombing campaign was justified [by the Bush administration] in the name of liberating Afghanistan," Faryal told us during a recent visit to the Bay Area. "But unfortunately, the replacement of Taliban fundamentalists with Northern Alliance fundamentalists smashed the dream of our people for a stable and peaceful and democratic Afghanistan."

A Human Rights Watch investigation backs Faryal's analysis: one year after the Dec. 5, 2001, Bonn Agreement was signed, most regional warlords enjoyed greater power than before the United States-led military intervention, and that has only created more misery.

"About four million people are on the verge of starvation," Faryal reported. Afghans' average life expectancy is 47 years. Infant mortality rates are high. Only one-quarter of newborns reach the age of five, and only 35 percent of Afghan children have access to school. Opium production has skyrocketed. In areas such as the western province of Herat, HRW found that women's rights to work, get an education, and freely express themselves have actually deteriorated since the U.S. invasion.

Faryal says the failure to improve conditions in Afghanistan is a direct outcome of U.S. policies in the region. The United States, she explains, relied on local warlords to help oust Taliban forces and to secure access to the countryside to build a natural gas pipeline.

"Obviously [the Northern Alliance commanders] were promised something," Faryal said. "You do that favor for us, and we'll give you power." During the Bonn process, U.S. support was crucial in guaranteeing Northern Alliance forces a strong voice in the peace deliberations. Now, "the most important positions were and are given to those who have had their hands heavily in the blood of the people and the destruction of the country," Faryal said.

For example, General Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a Northern Alliance warlord from the northern Panjshir Valley, was a member of the secret police during Afghanistan's communist government of 1992 to 1996, following the Soviet invasion, and then joined the Islamic uprising. He has now been appointed defense minister and is one of the Afghan Transitional Administration's four vice presidents. He continues to command a private army in the countryside loyal only to him.

The United States also actively blocked efforts to expand the United Nations' International Security Assistance Force beyond the capital city of Kabul. Instead, the United States actually helped strengthen regional warlords and their private militias with tens of millions of dollars in direct cash support to Northern Alliance commanders – cash they used to purchase more arms and further entrench their power. Other foreign interests, including Iran, Pakistan, some of the former Soviet republics to the north, and Saudi Arabia, responded by increasing their support for regional henchmen as well.

"For over two decades we've had regimes that have been imposed on the Afghan people," Faryal said. "There's this image in the world that this is probably what Afghan people want – that maybe [fundamentalists like the Taliban and the Northern Alliance] are a true representation of the culture, of the religion. Otherwise, why was there no uprising? But that is not true.... They have been created, nurtured, supported somewhere else."

With increased internecine fighting and no method for ensuring the safety of international workers, reconstruction and humanitarian aid projects have come to a virtual standstill.

"Billions of dollars in aid were promised [by the international community]," said Anne Brodsky, assistant professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Brodsky, author of the newly published With All Our Strength: The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, has visited Afghanistan and Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan on several occasions and interviewed hundreds of Afghans since Sept. 11, 2001. "But the money can't go in because there are no functioning banks. There are fears that the money is going to go to warlords instead of going to people who are actually going to make a difference. And the country is not secure for a lot of the projects that are supposed to happen."

It's a catch-22 situation: without humanitarian aid and economic development, Afghan men – most of whom live in rural areas – have few options but to join their local militias. "The warlords don't have all these people fighting for them based on ideological principles," Brodsky continued. "These are hungry people who had to make choices."

What little funds have made their way to Afghanistan, Brodsky reported, are going to international nongovernmental organizations in Kabul. And there is scant evidence that those infusions have done much to help destitute Afghans. "Rents have skyrocketed [in Kabul]," she said. "The NGOs have $40,000 Land Rovers."

Although Brodsky acknowledges that some NGOs there have years of experience operating in Afghanistan, many are newcomers unprepared for the task. Yet they draw skilled workers away from local organizations because they can pay them better.

"I've gotten the strangest phone calls from organizations that have never done education," she said. "They know nothing about Afghanistan. But they're going after that grant because there's money there. So they just want a consultant on there to help them figure out how they can get money to do education in Afghanistan."

Meanwhile, lawlessness reigns, combat continues, members of the Taliban still roam free, and the population suffers. Both women fear the window of opportunity for stability and democracy in Afghanistan may be closing as international attention is drawn elsewhere.