Afghanistan success still precarious

GARDEZ, Afghanistan -- Three years after the US invasion, Paktia Province and the rest of southeastern Afghanistan illustrate the mixed results of an intervention that ousted the Taliban regime but has yet to capture Osama bin Laden or forge a stable, centralized state to keep out terrorists for good.

In the simplest sense, the Bush administration has achieved the goal behind the US bombing that began here on Oct. 7, 2001: Afghanistan is no longer a sanctuary where anti-US militants could operate with impunity. And the country holds its first presidential election Saturday, a milestone by any measure.

But that success will remain precarious, according to Western diplomats, aid workers, and analysts, if the United States does not act quickly against two long-term threats -- the power of militia warlords and a resurgent drug economy that could make Afghanistan a lawless narco-state.

In March 2002, US troops fought hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in Operation Anaconda and other battles across the mountainous region surrounding Gardez, the capital of Paktia, a three-hour drive south of Kabul. Although large groups of anti-American militants can no longer move freely here, the region still faces scattered threats that include sporadic insurgent attacks on police and election officials, and local warlords whose loyalty to the US-backed government remains tenuous.

Last month, a rocket narrowly missed President Hamid Karzai's helicopter as it tried to land in Gardez for a campaign rally. And last week, US Marines arrested a local strongman who was once a US ally, Pacha Khan Zadran, after finding a cache of rockets and grenade launchers at his house -- only to release him days later in a display of US forces' ambiguous relationship with militia leaders, whom they have relied on for help tracking Al Qaeda but who also threaten the country's long-term stability.

That US reliance on warlords may have been counterproductive in the war on terrorism, diplomats and Afghan officials said in interviews this week. Southern militia leaders, such as Zadran, were deputized by US forces to battle Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but they allowed key suspects to slip away during clashes in Paktia's Shah-e-Kot valley and at Tora Bora farther east, senior Afghan security officials reiterated this week.

The United States has been slow to realize the toll on Afghans caused by their lingering fear of the warlords, the diplomats and Afghan officials said.

"Let's remember how Al Qaeda got into this country," a senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in an interview. He recalled that the Taliban came to power in 1996 because of years of civil conflict wreaked by militia commanders whom the United States supported in the campaign to drive out the Soviet Union.

"The thing Afghans want most is security. If they feel, as they were feeling then, that they are not secure, some of them could start to feel nostalgia for the Taliban." This could become the case particularly in the southeast, where most people share the Taliban leadership's Pashtun language and ethnicity.

Allowing northern warlords key positions in Kabul and in the Pashtun south may have further hampered the search for Taliban and Qaeda remnants by making Pashtun tribesmen feel shut out of power, leading to "some passivity toward the Taliban or even cooperation with the Taliban," the senior diplomat said. "The big mistake was not to face the warlords head on."

But the United States has recently shifted policy to focus more on defanging the warlords and fighting the drug trade. US commanders, too, say they have shifted their focus toward making Afghans feel more secure, which Colonel David Lamm, chief of staff for US-led forces here, called "the key to our success."

"Osama's a huge distraction," Lamm said in a recent interview. "He will make a mistake. He will get caught. The real security mission here revolves around the Afghan people."

By that measure, success has been mixed.

Violence in the past several months has been less than feared. Afghan security forces are being trained, and militia followers gradually disarmed. Lamm says US statistics show an increase in attacks on US forces, but he attributes that to better intelligence from Afghans that leads to more direct clashes as US troops go after their targets.

In a recent poll by an Afghan Human Rights consortium, 76 percent of Afghans who responded said they feel safer than they did a year ago. But the survey included only provinces considered safe enough for pollsters to travel.

In the only southern province polled, Kandahar, only 35 percent of residents said they felt safer. Fifty-nine percent nationwide said they believed fewer weapons were in warlords' hands, but more than 60 percent called militia disarmament the most important security issue for the country.

Thirty-three aid workers were killed in the first six months of 2004, compared with 14 in all of 2003, according to a report by the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a Kabul think tank funded by the British and Swedish governments. In recent months, killings and attacks in northern areas once considered safe -- including the beheading of an Afghan soldier and translator -- have added a frightening sense of unpredictability to the threat, the report said.

Six hundred Afghan National Police have been killed this year, the majority in a single southern province, Zabol, said Interior Ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal.

In 2002, the United Nations was able to visit every district in the country to prepare for the constitutional assembly, said Manoel de Almeida e Silva, spokesman for the UN mission here, but parts of Zabol and neighboring provinces are now too dangerous. "Today, we could not do that. It would be impossible."

The report blamed troop levels that are proportionally lower than in other international interventions. In Afghanistan, there is one foreign soldier per 1,115 people, compared with 1 per 161 in Iraq and 1 per 66 in Bosnia. NATO, which supplies about 9,000 troops, is considering reducing that number after Saturday's election.

Since Lieutenant General David Barno took command of American troops in Afghanistan last fall, US-led forces have been increased from 14,000 to around 20,000. They have changed tactics, focusing less on long-distance offensive operations and instead establishing small garrisons, called Provincial Reconstruction Teams, that take responsibility for security and reconstruction in a given area.

The teams have received mixed reviews, with Afghan officials saying they have dramatically improved security in some areas, including Paktia, but have not carried out the amount of reconstruction that their name implies.

The first reconstruction team was established last year in Gardez. Officials in the city, which lies in a dusty plain between mountain ranges, cite two major accomplishments by the team. They say it has improved relations with Afghans by cutting back on raids that offend cultural norms, such as breaking into houses and searching women. And, they say, it has helped rein in warlords like Zadran by mediating with them and buying them off with reconstruction projects in their village.

Haji Burhanuddin, 50, who runs a sewing machine shop in Gardez, said he feels much safer.

"Before there was no law, it was like a jungle. Anyone could come into my shop and take what they wanted, with a gun."

But another elderly man in the village, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals, said he still fears Taliban militants from across the Pakistani border.

"They are Pashtuns, they speak the same language, no one can spot them coming in," he said. He worries that the people who could help spot them are starting to lose their patience with Americans, he said. "They have not finished the projects they promised."

On one central corner, the house of Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani lies in rubble. A 500-pound US bomb hit it in the last stages of the war. But Haqqani escaped and the bomb killed several women and children; bright bits of colorful cloth have been hung on wires outside it as a shrine to the victims residents call martyrs. Haqqani remains in Pakistan, where he helps foreign fighters cross into and out of Afghanistan, said Mashal, the Interior Ministry spokesman.

Then there is the uncertain fate of Zadran. In 2002, his fighters hurled mortars at the city's downtown from two hilltops, killing more than a dozen people, in an effort to take the governorship by force. US troops relied on Zadran in Operation Anaconda, in which dozens of Taliban were killed, but he also allowed some to escape.

Mashal said the warlord often fed wrong information to the Americans. In the most infamous example, US warplanes bombed a convoy of tribal leaders, killing 50; Zadran was accused of having the United States eliminate his rivals.

The local liaison to the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Gardez, Faiz Zaland, said Zadran is now cooperating with authorities, in part in return for a school being built in his village. Yet the militia leader can still operate with some impunity, as the Marines found when his arrest brought a flurry of talks between their superiors and officials in Kabul and they were ordered to release him. Zadran's brother is a senior adviser to Karzai.

The number of troops in Gardez has tripled for the elections. They are laying elaborate plans to protect polling sites and ballot boxes from expected attacks. In the past week in rural areas, a police station has been bombed and a convoy of election workers ambushed.

"I think it's going to be a mini-Tet Offensive," said Marine Captain Chris O'Connor.

Troops and residents say they hope the election will bring the rule of law that Afghanistan needs. Focusing on bin Laden is beside the point, Lamm said: "A whole country is transforming."