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Afghanistan back to dog
Bush
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Thursday's foiled assassination attempt against
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and blasts in the
capital Kabul that reportedly killed at least 10 people
are certain to bring the country back into the limelight
just when President George W Bush wants to focus world
attention on the alleged necessity of ousting Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein.
The two incidents in
Afghanistan will also give weight to critics who say
that Washington should consolidate its victory over the
Taliban in Afghanistan before moving on to other
military adventures in Baghdad.
Those critics
include German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder who, of all
major US allies, has come out most solidly against a US
war to oust Hussein, even if Bush receives support from
the US Congress and the United Nations Security Council.
"My concern is that we have not even begun to
achieve in Afghanistan anything that could be called
nation-building," Schroeder warned in an interview with
the New York Times published on Thursday.
"Before we have made any progress there, before
we have proved to the disenfranchised masses in the
third world that it is worth their while to return to
the Western fold, I would say that military
interventions - in whatever terms they may be justified
- tend to be counterproductive for the international
coalition against terror."
The first of
Thursday's incidents took place in a busy Kabul shopping
area near the information ministry. A small explosion
was followed by a much larger car bomb that sent debris
and body parts flying across the area. UN sources said
that more than 20 people may have been killed in the
second blast.
It was the worst in a series of
recent bomb attacks that officials have blamed on Osama
bin Laden's al-Qaeda and another anti-Western faction
headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a mujahideen chieftain
who ironically received the bulk of Washington's covert
aid when Afghanistan was occupied by Soviet troops in
the 1980s.
Several hours later, an Afghan
security guard reportedly fired on a convoy in which
Karzai was riding in southern Kandahar, prompting the
president's US bodyguards to begin shooting. While
Karzai emerged unhurt in the exchange, at least three
Afghans were killed and Kandahar's governor, Gul Agha
Sherzai, was reportedly grazed by a bullet in the neck.
Kandahar is the heartland of the Pashtuns, the
largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, who have become
increasingly disaffected with the US-backed government
since the mainly Pashtun Taliban was ousted from power
last November. Although Karzai is himself a Pashtun, he
is widely seen by the group as a front for the
Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, which controls key
cabinet positions, including the defense and foreign
ministries.
Many Pashtuns reportedly believe
that the Northern Alliance was behind the July
assassination of the only Pashtun vice president, Hajji
Abdul Qadir, an incident that increased internal
tensions markedly and persuaded Washington to replace
Karzai's Afghan bodyguards with US Special Forces
personnel. The move also contributed to the sense that
the country's effective stabilization remains far off.
Hekmatyar, also a Pashtun, bitterly opposed the
Taliban but may now be linked to its remnants, as well
as to al-Qaeda, according to US officials. Earlier this
summer, the United States mounted an attack on a convoy
that it believed, mistakenly, was carrying Hekmatyar in
an apparent bid to eliminate him.
The
increasingly high-profile attacks in Afghanistan come as
the Pentagon has reportedly reconsidered its opposition
to expanding the International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF) beyond Kabul and into other major cities around
the country, including Kandahar.
For most of the
past eight months, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
repeatedly rejected appeals from Karzai, European
allies, a number of US lawmakers and relief groups
operating in Afghanistan to enlarge the 5,000-man ISAF
and extend its reach to help stabilize regions where
tensions between rival ethnic militias and warlords
occasionally erupt into violence.
The same
forces also argued that extending ISAF control around
the country was the only effective way of asserting the
central government's authority over the warlords. But
Rumsfeld steadfastly opposed such an effort, insisting
that it would interfere with Washington's efforts to
track down and eliminate remnants of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban.
Those efforts have turned out to have
been largely fruitless and reportedly are causing a drop
in morale among US special forces and ground forces
assigned to the task.
Instead, the Pentagon has
concentrated on equipping and training a new,
multi-ethnic Afghan army, a process that most observers
believe will take years. It pledged to intervene through
its air power and special forces personnel, who have
been attached to key warlords around the country since
last November to prevent local conflicts from getting
out of hand.
The latter strategy is increasingly
seen in the US and in Afghanistan as counter-productive,
especially in Pashtun areas that have borne the brunt of
deadly US air and commando strikes against civilians
that resulted for the most part from mistaken
intelligence or manipulation by rival warlords.
More recently, the disclosure that mainly Uzbek
forces under the control of Northern Alliance commander
General Abdurrashid Dostum killed hundreds of mainly
Pashtun and Pakistani prisoners after the fall of
Mazar-e-Sharif and Kunduz last November by sealing them
in containers has further inflamed Pashtun opinion
against the US, whose denials of any knowledge of the
killings have met a skeptical, at best, reception.
Dostum has received strong US backing.
Meanwhile, international reconstruction aid has
fallen far below targets agreed to by donors last
January and has been overwhelmed by the return of as
many as 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Pakistan
and Iran. Many of the returnees are camped on the dusty
outskirts of Kabul and other cities without access to
basic services, according to relief agencies.
"One has to wonder how this [Bush]
administration thinks that it can invade and then
stabilize Iraq with less international support than it
had in Afghanistan, when the situation in Afghanistan
itself is bordering on chaos 10 months after we went
in," noted one Congressional staff member.
(Inter Press Service)
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