Kabul's disaffected seek more change

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The line of Afghan men squatting on their haunches snakes around the block outside Iran’s embassy in Kabul. Most are hoping for visas to seek a better life across the border.

“We came back when the Taliban fled. We thought things would be good but there was nothing here for us. No work, no opportunities, so we are going back,” says Fazel Ahmad Azimi, who has sent his family ahead of him to Tehran.

He cannot afford to support 12 people on the $60 a month he earns at the education ministry and says he understands why more than 1,000 demonstrators rampaged through the capital last week in the worst street violence since the fall of the Taliban.

“Everyone was unemployed. They had no food. They were looking for an opportunity to loot,” he says.

The riots brought the unrest that has dogged southern Afghanistan to the gates of Kabul and shattered the illusion that the Taliban were the only threat facing the country. The violence was triggered when a US military truck ploughed into a busy intersection in the morning rush hour, causing a 12-car pile-up and igniting resentment about high-handed behaviour among foreign forces and the snail’s pace of reconstruction.

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What has Afghans so angry

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The young rioters in Kabul see Western aid agencies that don't seem to be helping change things much and a government dominated by one ethnic group

By RACHEL MORARJEE/KABUL

Posted Tuesday, May. 30, 2006

Five years after collapse of the Taliban, the streets of Kabul are typically clogged with land cruisers transporting foreigners or newly minted drug lords. Ordinary Afghans, however, still live much as they did before — with sewage flowing through open gutters at the side of the street, no running water and working electricity only about every two or three days.

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Kabul may arm local "militias" in the south

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The Afghan government is considering arming tribal groups across the south of the country, where Nato is set to take command next month, in a move diplomats say would destabilise the country.

As violence in the country’s four southern provinces rises to its worst level since 2001, armed village and tribal groups would be recruited to back up the increasingly overstretched police force and fledgling national army.

Jawed Ludin, chief of staff in the government of Hamid Karzai, said: “The government wants to take measures to strengthen the security situation in the south.

“It is not so much that the terrorists are strong, but that we are weak.”

However, experts say the tribal groups to be armed are likely to be militias commanded by warlords, which would create alternative power bases and weaken an already fragile state.

One western diplomat said: “If this happens it is the beginning of the end for southern Afghanistan and has far-reaching implications for the north and west.”

A senior western security official said: “This is a vote of no confidence in everything that has been done so far to reform the police and army.”

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Alarm over plan to allow warlords to rearm

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Foreign donors and Afghan legislators have reacted with alarm to an Afghan government idea that could allow some of the most feared warlords in southern Afghanistan to rearm their men in order to fight the Taliban.

Security in the region is at its worst level in years but outside the government many feel recruiting local tribesmen to back up official security forces will undermine the already brittle state institutions.

“It is a complete scandal. Thugs that we have worked for years to remove from power will come back with a vengeance,” said a senior western official.

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[ 10 June 2006: Message edited by: rasmus raven ]

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The bourgeoisie actually needs pretty good information about what's really happening...

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That is why (to drift for a moment) CEOs of insurance companies, and especially CEOs of re-insurance companies, are not skeptical about global warming.

But back to Afghanistan. (Posted this elsewhere, but it bears re-posting). The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was pleasantly surprised by the new parliament:

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The parliament has proved that it is not a tightly controlled vehicle for Karzai or the Americans. It set about its first task in March 2006 with the kind of earnestness and professionalism one might expect from much older bodies. In Afghanistan's presidential system of government, the country's new constitution gives parliament the power to approve the president's cabinet and the MPs did just that. They politely demanded that each of Karzai's twenty-five cabinet ministers present their credentials, say what they had achieved and hoped to achieve, and then answer tough, rapid-fire questions from the MPs.

Even more remarkable was that the proceedings were, for the first time, broadcast live on TV and on radio. A large part of the population watched them. For a month work came to a standstill while mesmerized Afghans heard tribal and warlord ministers fumble for words as they sought to explain themselves. Eventually on April 20 parliament approved only twenty ministers, forcing Karzai to fire five of his nominees.

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but points out:

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...an estimated one third of the male MPs consists of warlords, gross violators of human rights, or men involved in drug smuggling. It is what you get after more than two decades of war.

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and is not hopeful about the overall situation of the country:

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It is now five years since George W. Bush declared victory in Afghanistan and said that the terrorists were smashed. Since the Bonn meeting, in late 2001, a smorgasbord of international military and development forces has been increasing in size. How is it, then, that Afghanistan is near collapse once again? To put it briefly, what has gone wrong has been the invasion of Iraq: Washington's refusal to take state-building in Afghanistan seriously and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq. For Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money, and a lack of coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives on the part of Western and Afghan leaders. The Bonn conference created the scaffolding to build the new Afghan structure, but what was consistently missing were the bricks and running water. Inside the scaffolding there is still only the barest shell.

One consequence has been a revived Taliban movement that has made a third of the country ungovernable. Together with al-Qaeda, Taliban leaders are trying to carve out new bases on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. They are aided by Afghanistan's resurgent opium industry, which has contributed to widespread corruption and lawlessness, particularly in the south. The country's huge crop of poppies is processed into opium and refined into heroin for export, now accounting for close to 90 percent of the global market. This spring's crop is expected to be larger than ever, and reports suggest that drug smugglers are increasingly forming alliances with Taliban fighters. According to the Independent in London, Islamic fighters agreed to temporarily suspend their campaign of violence during the poppy harvest this year, to ensure maximum profits. The Afghan government has shown a fatal incapacity to deliver services to its people and the West has failed to deal with interfering neighbors, such as Pakistan and Iran.

The situation was becoming so critical that many concerned donors, but especially the United Nations, debated how to formally continue extending support to Afghanistan after the process agreed on at Bonn was completed. In February 2006, Karzai, the UN, and a large group of nations signed the Afghanistan Compact in London, setting out, once again, the world's commitment to Afghanistan and in turn Kabul's commitment to state-building over the next five years. Praised as a major declaration of the world's solidarity with Afghanistan, the compact is in fact an admission of strategic failure. Many of its goals can be found in numerous promises, agreements, and pledges that were made, and never fulfilled, by the US, Britain, and other powerful nations as far back as 2001. The compact may well be a case of too little too late—even if it could be fully carried out. Rubin observes that the Afghan government will be held accountable for any failure to meet the compact's ambitious goals, but the Western nations that sponsored it cannot be held accountable. We have seen the same pattern in Iraq and Sudan. The international community makes promises that remain unfulfilled, only to remake them a few years later, freshly packaged.

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Their lands have soaked up the blood of foreign invaders and rescuers from every corner of the world.

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A shake-up of Afghanistan's top police chiefs has dealt a blow to the entire force's reform and reintroduced poorly qualified and corrupt officials to senior posts, western officials say.

Hamid Karzai, the president, approved a list of 86 senior police officers earlier this week but sidestepped the recommendations of a police reform committee and ignored the results of an examination designed to rank officers according to merit.

"I don't think it is beneficial to the professionalisation of the police," said Tom Koenigs, the special representative of the secretary general of the United Nations in Afghanistan.

At the last minute 11 men who had not passed the examinations were added to the list of appointments by the president, replacing better qualified candidates.

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KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan police chief doesn't realize his voice is being taped. So pardon him if he brags about his life as a drug trafficker.

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Originally posted by ceti:
I'm not sure about that, but definitely over the last 200 years -- Carry on up the Khyber!

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