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THE ROVING
EYE
From Kabul to Baghdad
By Pepe Escobar
The suspense is unbearable.
Will it come in just a few paragraphs? Will it come in
hundreds, perhaps thousands of pages? In English? Or in
Arabic? Delivered where, and by whom? The fate of Saddam
Hussein's regime in Iraq - as well as the future of the
Middle East itself - depends on Iraq's full declaration
of weapons of mass destruction, to be handed over this
Sunday at the United Nations compound in Baghdad. The
declaration then travels in the hands of a UN official
to New York by plane, so the UN Security Council will
not have the original document before Monday. Unlike
previous declarations, all the contents of this one will
be made public, according to the current president of
the Security Council, Colombian ambassador Alfonso
Valdivieso.
Iraq's last declaration of
biological weapons, in 1997, had 600 pages. And the last
declaration of missiles, almost 3,000 pages. The main
text was in English, the notes in Arabic. In Saturday's
declaration, everything has to be listed: substances,
materials, every relevant office and every relevant
corner of any building, along with their official
purpose. Diplomatic sources comment that it will take at
least a few days to fully examine the document and draw
the necessary conclusions.
The Bush
administration is maintaining maximum pressure on Iraq
and will be looking for anything that could be
characterized as "material breach". North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) approval for an attack
against Iraq is practically assured, according to Paul
Wolfowitz, the Pentagon's number two. European diplomats
are saying off the record that NATO's role might be
justified "as an effort to defend Turkey, a NATO ally".
But, says one diplomat, "this is nonsense, because
planes based in Turkey are attacking Iraq, and not the
other way round".
Roughly one year ago, Osama
bin Laden was escaping from the B-52s pounding the
mountains at Tora Bora, in Afghanistan's Nangarhar
province, while in Petersberg, near Bonn, a wild bunch
emerging from Taliban-free Afghanistan was trying to
find themselves a leader. After a lot of hardcore
resentment was expressed and a lot of US pressure was
applied, the chosen leader turned out to be a minor
Pashtun notable, Hamid Karzai, whom the US had rescued
from certain death in Kandahar province at the hands of
the Taliban only a few weeks before.
Hamid
Karzai's new government was supposed to enjoy the fruits
of massive international economic aid to try to manage
three complex tasks: revive a country totally devastated
by 23 years of uninterrupted war; round up the thousands
of Taliban and al-Qaeda who managed to escape US bombs;
and start the painful reconstruction of what one day
would be a unified Afghanistan. This week,
representatives of all those countries which promised
well-publicized billions of dollars to Karzai's new
government came back to Bonn. But there was nothing
spectacular to announce. The billions of dollars are not
flowing into Afghanistan. Only now, the first big
project is being launched - in road construction.
It will take a long time to build an Afghan
national army. The so-called coalition and stabilization
forces represent no more than a cantonment in Kabul,
just about the only place in the country where there is
a semblance of authority by the central government.
Warlords rule the provinces, where the favorite joke is
that Karzai is not capable of ruling even his own chair.
General Fahim, the powerful Minister of Defense,
actually decides everything that matters, to the benefit
of his close coterie of Panjshiris from the Northern
Alliance.
Afghan sources tell Asia Times Online
practically every week about attacks against US forces
in the Pashtun belt. The attacks are part of the jihad
to kick out "foreign invaders", formally launched in
August in southeastern Afghanistan. At the start of this
week, Radio Tehran, Pakistani Urdu newspapers and
Islamic news agencies widely reported that 50
International Security Assistance Force soldiers,
predominantly Americans, travelling on the three-hour
journey between Logar province and Gardez, in Paktia,
were kidnapped by mujahideen. Their Afghan guides were
apparently involved in the kidnapping, all of them
associated with the Northern Alliance, which means they
acted under the orders of General Fahim, who wants the
Americans out of his turf.
Meanwhile, in Bonn,
the West once again demanded from Karzai all kinds of
efforts - political, economic, institutional. But anyone
who has been to Afghanistan knows that what the country
really needs is all kinds of practical help, and not
bags of promises that cannot be kept. There's no way the
Afghan economy will pick up speed without a lot of
urgent investment in infrastructure. Opium poppy
cultivation will not disappear if peasants are not
offered other means of subsistence: Karzai-era heroin
sales are booming again in Antwerp and Amsterdam.
The Taliban simply won't go away: on the
contrary, they have blended in everywhere. US journalist
Bob Woodward has recently revealed how George W Bush
bought Afghan warlords to the tune of US$70 million, so
US forces would not need to stage a dangerous, massive
land invasion of Afghanistan. This saved many US lives,
but the practical results are in fact a disaster.
There's no peace to speak of in Afghanistan.
George W Bush wanted to "smoke out" Osama bin Laden and
capture him "dead or alive". Osama is alive and kicking,
firing up his war through the global media, and betting
more than ever on a clash of civilizations. The most
tangible effect of the war against terrorism is the
ressurgence of Talibanization in Pakistan. In the latest
Pakistani elections, the Islamist front Muttahida
Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) - an alliance of six religious
parties - captured most of the seats in parliament and
won a majority in the ultra-sensitive provinces
neighboring Afghanistan - Baluchistan and the North West
Frontier Province (NWFP).
The MMA wants to
prohibit further operations in the search for al-Qaeda
members in the NWFP, any operations in which the CIA
participates, and the use of Pakistani airbases for
"foreigners" to launch military operations in
Afghanistan.
In the NWFP, the mullahs are back
in full force, enforcing the burqa, prohibiting mixed
classes, and vowing to apply a key tenet of the MMA
program - "to finish off with vulgarity and obscenity"
on TV. The elites in urban Pakistan are terrified that
sooner or later the mullahs may also be applying an
array of punishments related to moral questions -
cutting off hands, piercing eyes, stoning
adulteresses.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, it's already raining bombs and
pamphlets - just like in Afghanistan a little more than
a year ago. US and British planes - many of them based in
Turkey - keep bombing Iraqi air defenses, the last time
on Wednesday, 25 kilometers northeast of Mosul. In the
exclusion zone north of the 36th parallel, the US and
Britain operate 45 combat planes, serviced by 1400 men.
In the exclusion zone south of the 33th parallel, they
operate 150 combat planes, serviced by 6,000 men.
This year, there have been 406 incidents,
including 149 since September 16, the day Baghdad
accepted the return of inspectors from the UN and the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Since the voting of
UN Resolution 1441, there have been 7 incidents in the
north and 17 in the south, according to General Richard
Myers, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last
Sunday,13 coalition planes dropped 23 precision-guided
bombs over Iraqi air defense installations, including an
advanced vehicle-mounted detection radar, according to
the US. According to the Iraqi version, the bombed site
was the headquarters of an oil company .
In a
measure of the decrepit state of Saddam's army, the
Iraqis are now using Roland surface-to-air batteries
sold by France way back in the 1980s during the
Iran-Iraq War, as well as Russian SAM-3 missiles. The
US, along with its bombs, is also dropping containers,
each one with up to 60,000 sheets of paper of 18cm by
7.5cm. The pamphlets, in English and Arabic, target the
general population and most of all policemen, militiamen
and the army. They "advise" Iraqi soldiers not to repair
the installations destroyed by the bombing, and tell
Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south that these
bombings are a means to protect them from the Iraqi
army.
So the war is in fact well under way. As
the Bush administration remains obsessed about Iraq,
Afghanistan once again has slipped to the status of a
mere sideshow. In the US administration's global
strategy, allies are considered an annoying sideshow
anyway, some of them barely redeemed by their deep
pockets. There's no real interest in even trying to help
nation-building. A real victory in Afghanistan is very
hard to consolidate - and not at all spectacular in
media terms. To smash Saddam Hussein's crippled forces
in prime time with high technology is a lot sexier. Bush
senior had a "vision thing". His son's vision as applied
to Afghanistan may be a roadmap for what will be
America's strategy in Iraq.
(©2002 Asia Times
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