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THE ROVING EYE
Kabul: Rocking, rolling and
'carpet-bombing'
By Pepe Escobar
KABUL -
The rooftop at Mustapha's is arguably the coolest place
in post-Taliban, foreign-policed Kabul. Mustapha is
basically a safe house for United Nations personnel, NGO
staff and the odd Afghan-American returnee. At the end
of a hot, dusty, exhausting day dodging mesmerizing
traffic jams of taxis, buses, donkey carts and Toyota
Land Cruisers belonging to every imaginable humanitarian
agency or NGO on earth, to feel the breeze at Mustapha's
rooftop contemplating the stars and the mountains is the
closest to peace one can aspire to in troubled Kabul.
There are signs of a new life everywhere.
Foreign Office staff proudly display their brand new
Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan stationery -
the country's third appellation in a year. There's an
internet cafe in the basement of that derelict modernist
pearl, the Intercontinental Hotel, terribly expensive by
Afghan standards (US$5 an hour), when late last year the
sole tattered battery of the sole battered satellite
phone in the lobby was dead on an everyday basis.
Ariana Afghan Airlines is flying again - to the
delight of its heroic technical advisor, Feda Fedawi.
The Cinema Bakthar is doing a roaring business with
Indian flicks. There's a video shop with the latest
Bollywood specials in every corner. There are many more
burqa-less women and many more female smiles - as
women are finally able to lead normal public lives again
without having to hide behind a veil. Spanish
peacekeeping soldiers armed to the teeth kill time
during the day hunting for souvenirs at impromptu street
bazaars. Greedy merchants in Chicken Street salute
foreigners disposed to shell out almost $100 for B-52
and Apache helicopter-themed carpets, which add a new
meaning to the term "carpet bombing". Kabul rocks - and
rolls. Now there are parties - apparently - every week.
"Everything is flown in from Russia by helicopter -
caviar, champagne and the women," proclaims an insider.
Who gets to these parties? "The people you see driven
around on those huge 4X4s," he notes evasively.
Some things never change, though. Nothing beats
the experience of entering a tea shop in the sprawling
Naderpashtun bazaar and watching a fabulous river of
humanity pass by. And armies of street kids are still
begging everywhere. At least 1.5 million refugees have
already trickled back home since the beginning of 2002 -
mostly from Pakistan and Iran, only to find the same
dreadful catalogue of crippling poverty, shaky security
as close as 5 kilometers outside of Kabul, the still
undisputed reign of the Kalashnikov culture, and -
despite a few hundred working schools - a literacy rate
of no more than 30 percent. Just like in Cambodia during
the UN jamboree 10 years ago, the sight of foreigners
with expense accounts ordering lasagna al fresco is not
exactly a sign of progress.
One question is
essential: where is the money? There may be signs of
crippling poverty everywhere in Kabul, but there's a lot
of money in the two money changing markets. Anyone with
a stack of afghanis ($1 = 40,000 afghanis) sits down on
the sidewalk and gets to business. Soon there will be a
new afghani - equal to 1,000 old ones - with no pictures
of Afghan heroes (just like the euro) to avoid
controversies among Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and
Hazaras, only with pictures of mosques and historical
monuments. Six different versions of the afghani can
still be found in the country: a lot of people still
have problems identifying the real thing from the fakes.
"Dostum" afghanis are everywhere - and are promptly
rejected: the Russians used to print special afghanis
for Uzbek mega-warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum.
It
is widely suspected that Dostum's people are now
plundering customs revenue in the north. According to
Mohamad Rahim, customs director in the province of
Balkh, more than 25 billion afghanis were collected in
the past 12 months just at Hayratan, a strategic river
port 30 kilometers from the Uzbek border. But the
government has not seen the color of money since July.
According to customs officials in Hayratan, gunmen are
showing up regularly to collect the revenues. One of the
officials says that "nothing happens in Hayratan without
Dostum's permission". There may be trading and commerce
money for the moneychangers, and money collected at
customs, but there's certainly no money to pay teachers.
According to Mohammad Subooryar, deputy director of
education in the province of Ghor, teachers' salaries
have not been paid in more than a year. The United
Nations Development Program (UNDP) is supposed to pay
each teacher $40 a month, but the money has
"disappeared" somewhere in the Byzantine Afghan banking
system.
At the hyper-congested Ministry of
Planning in Kabul, Minister Mohamed Mohaqeq - a Hazara -
is desperate. Mohaqeq, a former military commander, was
one of the key leaders (along with Dostum) who captured
Mazar-I-Sharif from the Taliban last November. Today he
denounces the fact that millions of dollars in aid are
being diverted out of the government's coffers by
"well-connected people". Because inter-governmental
dialogue is so fractious, Mohaqeq says that the
officials who should be in charge of aid distribution
have no voice, and the money disappears before getting
to the people in need. Afghanistan's annual GDP per
capita remains $160. If you're lucky enough to find a
job as a government employee, your salary will be $30 on
average - or a maximum of $50. Mohaqeq says that he
knows people involved in reconstruction aid who are
getting their hands on as much as $15,000 a month.
He adds that there's lavish spending in luxury
goods - like on those swinging underground "parties".
His solution: all aid money should come through the
central government, most of all through his Ministry of
Planning. Well-positioned Afghan-Americans argue that
this would not do either as it reflects a Soviet-style
concept of central planning. They suggest that the money
should come directly to each concerned ministry - the
whole process supervised by teams of Western experts.
Meanwhile, the problems just accumulate. Donor countries
and a plethora of international organizations have
pledged $1.8 billion to Afghanistan in 2002 alone, and a
total of $4.5 billion over five years. The targets this
year are far from being met. On his recent visit to
Kabul, the UN special envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar
Brahimi, expressed what any average Afghan is now
beginning to understand: Brahimi would like to see a
fraction of the billions of dollars funding the American
military machine spent on aid and development. Afghan
Education Minister Yunus Qanooni touched on the same
point, "If the international community allocated only a
small part of the budget it's using to fight terrorism
and educated a new generation of Afghans, that would be
a great service." Only 3 million of the estimated 4.5
million Afghan children are now in school. The shortage
of teachers, buildings and teaching materials is
mind-boggling. At least 2,500 schools need to be built.
At least 3,500 schools need urgent repair. According to
the Education Ministry, the country needs only $874
million to rebuild its entire school system until the
end of 2003. But the money is still not forthcoming.
The country more than ever depends on the
goodwill of people such as Muhamad. He's a Pashtun from
Kandahar married to a Hazara. He's been 25 years out of
Afghanistan - first in Australia then in the US. Now he
describes himself as "a banker in Washington". He's back
to help - distributing school packets in the Hazarajat,
or at the Lycee Malalai in Kabul. "You should see the
look in their eyes when they get their first pen", he
says. Muhamad perfectly understands the menace posed by
powerful Afghan warlords as far as the country's future
is concerned, "They are always uneasy when they have to
deal with educated people. They only understand military
language. They are unfit to rule." Muhamad tells of very
powerful Afghans working in the background, close to
King Zahir Shah's family, who have told him that they
would leave Afghanistan again if the situation did not
change: namely, a new kind of government strong enough
to face the warlords.
The fact is the struggle
between Afghans with a modern view for the country like
Muhamad and the old mujahideen leaders is once again
being won decisively by the warlords - and these
include, of course, Northern Alliance warlord Mohamed
Fahim, now the powerful Defense Minister. It's an open
secret in Kabul that Fahim is the man in charge,
dwarfing the always elegant but otherwise ineffective
Hamid Karzai. Fahim, a Tajik from the Panjshir Valley,
was an operative of the political police during
Najibullah's communist regime, and then directed the
secret police of the mujahideen governments from 1992 to
1996. He's not exactly a diplomat.
Afghans
recently arrived from America or Europe trying to help
in the reconstruction of the country say that they have
the feeling of a clock turned back to 10 years ago, to
the mujahideen "governments" that evolved into a civil
war that practically destroyed Kabul and created the
conditions for the emergence of the Taliban. The only
argument of the warlords to justify their preeminence is
the usual "but we were the ones who stayed here and
fought the jihad" (against the Soviets). Average
Afghans, though, are tired of the warlords' grip on the
country. Some of these warlords even denounced Sima
Samar, the minister for women's affairs, as
"Afghanistan's Salman Rushdie".
Hamid Karzai's
transitional government has so far failed completely to
enhance the power emanating from Kabul and extend it to
the provinces - for obvious reasons: Afghans everywhere
outside of Kabul see Karzai as "the man from America", a
weak president who cannot go anywhere without his
American bodyguards. Ismail Khan, the so-called "Emir of
southwest Afghanistan" who runs four provinces, and
Abdul Dostum, who runs crucial Mazar-i-Sharif in the
north, remain the lords of regional fiefdoms, and don't
give a damn about Kabul. Pashtuns in the Pashtun belt
are secretly organizing their own counter-power. And
there's absolutely nothing that the US can do about any
of this.
The US still refuses to allow
peacekeeping forces out of Kabul, so they could help
Hamid Karzai to disarm the warlords. The Pentagon says
that an extension of their role would compromise direct
American military operations. The West as a whole still
does not tie aid for regional government projects as
conditional on human rights progress - which would be a
way to reign in the warlords. And - worst of all - the
West is not even providing a fraction of the aid that it
promised, with or without strings attached. Take the
matter of roads. Jalalabad-Kabul, a mere 150 kilometers,
is still a back-breaking five-hour journey around a
moonscape. The West - for all its claims of not
abandoning Afghanistan this time - still is not
committed to help the road-building. Without a decent
road system, Afghanistan simply cannot even begin to
reap some benefits from its crucial location as a
Central Asia crossroads.
The World Food Program
(WFP) estimates that over half of all Afghan families
are in need of emergency aid. But the WFP has received
only 57 percent of the food that it needs from foreign
donors.The United Nations High Commission for Refugees
(UNHCR) is also in dire straits. The constant flood of
Afghan refugees pouring in from Pakistan has simply
overwhelmed the UN. Hundreds of thousands of these
refugees lived in Peshawar or Karachi - and not in
refugee camps. A lot of them complain that Pakistani
police harassment forced them to go back to Afghanistan.
And when they come back they find that their homes have
been destroyed and livestock killed. Even under so much
strain, the UNHCR had to cut food rations to the
returnees by two-thirds - and it is still warning that
it may have to end all food distribution if foreign
governments do not come up with the money they promised.
It's crucial to remember today that "regime
change" was never the main target of the US bombing of
Afghanistan. "Regime change" evolved into a doctrine
only when the Pentagon woke up to the reality that it
would be nearly impossible to capture Osama bin Laden
and eliminate the danger of any further al-Qaeda attack.
But now "regime change" in Afghanistan is about
the only tangible success of the US after Washington's
decision to answer to the September 11 challenge with
overwhelming military force. In the process, the
American bombing machine killed what is estimated in
Kabul nowadays as as many as 8,000 innocent civilians -
a "collateral damage" (copyright Pentagon)
two-and-a-half times the number of victims of September
11. And this total does not include the incalculable
number of those who died of hunger during the disruption
of aid supplies last October - ordered by the US. The US
also set the extremely dangerous precedent of one
nation's right to overthrow a foreign government - any
foreign government - by bombing, and is now trying to
sell world opinion a replay in Iraq. Poor, hard-working
Kabulis in the bazaars are still happy: at least they
can be entertained by an Indian movie without being
tortured by the Taliban. But some educated Afghan
returnees are increasingly desperate. A collection of
opinions not usually carried by the Western media says
it all. One of these returnees says that "the situation
is a mess. The Americans came too early, without doing
their homework, bombing everything. One more month of
pressure and the Taliban would have collapsed, and we
could have decided our future by ourselves." Another
says. "The US is giving only minimal economic and food
aid. They are only seeking their own interests." A third
one complains. "[King] Zahir Shah was denied being named
head of state by the US envoy, Khalilzad. The Northern
Alliance was the chosen government by the US so that
they could build their oil pipeline through
Afghanistan." And a fourth one goes straight to the
point: "If the Americans want to remain loved by the
Afghans they should finish al-Qaeda as soon as possible
and then go away."
On December 21, 2001, George
W Bush said that 2002 would be "a year of war". The new
Iraqi war is coming, while the new Afghan war is far
from over. But the definitive historical judgement of
the American adventure in Afghanistan will depend on
whether the bombing-provoked fall of the Taliban is
capable of outweighing so many unbearable "collateral"
costs.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contactcontent@atimes.com for
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