Struggle ahead for Afghanistan
WHEN THE next president enters the Oval Office in January, he will face the toughest foreign policy decisions of any president since Franklin Roosevelt. But the toughest of all will involve the struggle for Afghanistan.
Lest he fall prey to Washington's beltway wisdom, he should be advised that today's Afghanistan is as much a creation of Washington and Islamabad as it is of Kabul. He should also know that achieving anything resembling real victory will require rethinking basic assumptions about both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As the first Americans to negotiate a TV crew into Kabul in 1981, after the western press corps had been expelled, we encountered a country frozen between its feudal past and 100 years of social modernization. What we witnessed was an Afghan state walking a fine line between communism, capitalism, and a uniquely "progressive" and moderate Islam.
Today's Afghanistan suffers no trace of its progressive Islamic past. Culturally erased by the US- and Saudi Arabian-backed war from Pakistan, Afghanistan is a neo-feudal, corporatized playground of warlords, NATO troops, private military companies, and radicalized Islamists. On Kabul's traffic-congested streets, "liberated" chador-clad women beg desperately for handouts at the darkened windows of local drug lords' Japanese SUVs. For thousands of years a hub for trade and a melting pot of cultures, Afghanistan is now the world's largest exporter of heroin and extreme forms of Islam.
After seven years and billions spent, little economic and social rebuilding can be seen. The new constitution guarantees women's rights. Women work and vote, girls can go to school. But without security or oversight in the countryside, hard fought women's rights mean nothing.
The next president must reverse this process by remaking US policy. That policy must address the needs of the Afghan people, not Washington. He must revamp USAID management to ensure that roads are rebuilt, power is restored, irrigation systems are improved, and independent contractors are held responsible for their work. He must redeploy thousands of troops from Iraq to major population centers around Afghanistan, disarm warlords, and establish security. He must also convince America's NATO allies to get serious. Under current counterterrorism doctrine, Afghanistan would require 400,000 International Security and Assistance Force soldiers. There are currently 47,000. That done, he can promote alternative food crops while encouraging drug manufacturers to purchase Afghan opium for legal medicinal use.
With the Afghan people's support, the president can then proceed to political problems and Pakistan's subversive role in them. These problems stem from a failed British colonial policy designed to make Afghanistan invisible as a nation.
The first stirrings of Afghan nationalism began in the 16th century. In 1747 Ahmed Shah Durrani established an Afghan empire that was one of the world's largest and a dynasty that lasted until the Marxist coup of 1978.
Nonetheless, India's 19th century British viceroy, Lord Curzon, claimed Afghanistan was "a purely accidental geographic unit." British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli advocated subsuming Afghanistan into British India. Failing that, in 1893 the British drew a line down the Hindu Kush (the Durand line), dividing Afghan tribal homelands.
Following Indian partition in 1947, Britain refused to renegotiate the boundary. Pakistan's struggle to control these Afghan homelands provided cause for Cold War confrontation. In 1979, it provided President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, with the bait to lure the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam.
From that day forward, this historic border dispute, originally intended as a hedge against Afghan independence, has grown into an international monster.
Pakistan's obsession with another border dispute with India fuels its need for nuclear weapons. Its fear of annihilation justifies smuggling guns and heroin, helping the Taliban, and harboring terrorists like Osama bin Laden. Only the United States can forge a lasting peace between India and Pakistan, but only a lasting peace will stop Pakistan's interference in Afghanistan. America's Afghanistan is not Vietnam or Iraq. America's Afghanistan is a dream that can still be made to happen. It is something the new president must do.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are authors of "Invisible History, Afghanistan's Untold Story," which will be published in January.
