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Politics
and peace in Afghanistan:
By December last year, after the unexpectedly rapid
collapse of the Taliban in the main cities, the war in
Afghanistan looked as good as over. Today, things appear
very different. The main leaders of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban remain at large, as do many of their followers.
Last week, the 87-year-old
former Afghan King, Zahir Shah, has finally returned to
Kabul. He will find the city very different from the
vibrant metropolis he was forced to leave 29 years ago.
During his absence, the land of 23 million people, once a
safe and popular stop on the Asian hippy trail, descended
into a hell of death and devastation. The United Nations
estimates 1.5 million Afghans have died, two million have
been wounded and five million made refugees in fighting
that started in 1979 with the Soviet invasion.
The royal palace, from where
he had reigned for 40 years, is a ruined hulk – forcing
the ex-king to take up residence in a villa. Nothing in
Kabul has escaped the ravages of the post-Soviet civil
war, which has reduced almost two thirds of the Afghan
capital to rubble. But the city and the country have
changed far more profoundly during Zahir Shah’s exile than
the physical scars of war might suggest.
The
Afghan nation, if it can presently be called that, has
been as much at war with itself as with external invaders.
So completely has the state structure been demolished that
the king is currently protected by an Italian army
contingent. Similarly, the Karzai administration looks to
the International Security Assistance Force for
maintaining its authority in Kabul. Outside the capital,
the warlords rule the country as the US-led allied forces
continue their clear-up operations.
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The Reconstruction of
Afghanistan
“There has been a debate here, both in relation to the Tokyo
conference and from the point of view of the West’s political
interests, about how the task of reconstructing Afghanistan should
be undertaken. Two fairly contradictory approaches emerged.
One rests on
the belief that the pivot of the aid and rehabilitation effort
should be the central government in Kabul; the other is based on
the agreement that it will be idealistic to hope for a strong
central authority
in the foreseeable approach and that instead the focus should be
on seeking the cooperation of regional warlords.
The opposing views clashed at a discussion the other day at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Two of the
foundation’s senior associates, Marina Ottaway and Anatol Levin,
advocated in a policy brief that Kabul and the central government
should not be made prizes worth fighting over, because this would
create the old situation of everyone seeking to capture the center
of political and financial power, and the international community
should work directly with regional leaders whose power was seen to
be well-established. Moreover, they said, aid should be used in a
clearheaded and tough way as an instrument of
peacekeeping, as an incentive for
local warlords and armies not to go to war with each other. In
other words, it is to bribe the regional chiefs and commanders.
Ottaway and
Levin’ premise arises from the understanding of Afghanistan as a
more or less medieval state where the democratic reconstructing
model will not work. They argue that the international community’s
immediate aim for the Afghan government, they said, should not be
the “impossible fantasy of a democratic government
technocratically administering the country, but rather the
formation of a loose national mediation committee functioning not
just for the initial six months as envisaged in the Bonn accord
but indefinitely.”
The committee should seek not
to create the whole apparatus of a modern state, but rather the
minimum conditions for medieval civilization: the avoidance of
major armed conflict, the security of main trade routes, and the
safety and neutrality of the capital.
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This reasoning
was forcibly challenged by Paula Newburg, the South Asian specialist
who is now special adviser to the United Nations Foundation. She
said Afghanistan should not be seen as an embryo of the Dark Ages,
and reminded the audience that the country was a member even of the
League of Nations. It had carried “everyone’s ambitions on its
back”; it now needed some form of central authority, and the Afghans
themselves should be allowed to determine what kind of
infrastructure they wanted. The existence of an Afghan state should
be acknowledged; reign by warlords should not be confused with
decentralization of power.
Ms Newburg was against any concession to warlords, and said the
Afghan people’s aspirations for democracy and justice should be
respected. Many warlords had already been empowered by the
coalition military campaign – which, Ms Newburg pointed out in an
aside, was not meant to rescue Afghans from the Taliban but had
other objectives.
Obviously both sides in the debate have their strong points. But it
does seem that bribing warlords and giving them financial and
administrative autonomy will only increase the temptation for
neighboring countries with political and ethnic stakes in
Afghanistan to do their own quiet bribing also. The old pattern may
thus be repeated and provide at best an unstable structure rocked by
internecine tensions.”
Tahir Mirza: Guantanamo a syptom of what’s wrong, in
DAWN, Thursday, January 24, 2002.
A group of clowns composed by 22 clown-doctors lead personally by
Patch Adams, representing five continents: Northern and Southern
America, Europe, Africa, Australia and Japan, visited recently Kabul
to stage performances in some humanitarian projects, including in
Terre des hommes (Tdh) ASCHIANA street-children projects and
maternal health projects: “Without going into the merits of war,
considered by some “just and legitimate” and by others as “holy”,
war is still war and such underscores the failure of diplomacy and
politics. In other words, the absence of reasoning, with the
inevitable death and destruction, famine and other consequences all
too familiar.
Against
the war, but above all, against the exploitation on the part of the
media that brings us our images in a format almost scripted for it’s
entertainment value, we feel the need and the duty to offer a
different service: humanitarian, an alternative and, if only in
part, a solution to some of the indiscriminate cruelty.”
The
mission brought, on top of food, medicines, blankets, music
instruments, and 5000 kites, that had been banished during the
Taliban. Laughter staged where war is being waged. The city of Rome,
particularly the Mayor of town, is directly financing the project,
willing to broadcast it internationally.
New
Street-working children project in Peshawar
In Pakistan, the Peshawar Street Children Project Center opened its
doors on 11th of March to nowadays 70 very poor
street-working children who have been selected according to
psychosocial criteria – including carefully conducted family visits
by social workers. The center offers educational and recreational
activities including art activities by a psychologist.
Rustaq Post-Earthquake
Rehabilitation Project
In the remote
Hindukush region of Rustaq 173 Terre des hommes staffs are
busy to install water & sanitation projects, to keep the 11 schools
running and to maintain a health program for the whole district with
173 villages. Presently additional 73 teams of volunteers, three
coordinators and 15 supervisors are engaged in National Immunization
Days NID to vaccinate children against polio. In order to respond to
the ongoing food crisis in Rustaq, Tdh’ distributed wheat,
provided by the Irish agency CONCERN to the villages. In March
56.250 kg of wheat have been distributed to 1125 very poor families.
Tdh is committed to continue with distribution up to June
for poor families who lost everything during the past three years of
drought and insecurity.
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