Afghanistan: Emerging From The Rubble
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Image: Corbis
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here is no hint in Mahammod Khan’s boyish face and gentle demeanour that he is a member of Parliament from Kandahar, a province in southern Afghanistan where ordinary citizens have blind dates with violent death almost every day.
As he talks of leaving Kandahar for the relative safety of Kabul, Khan, a 30-something doctor of medicine, pours green tea into white china cups and leans back in his faux leather office chair that still sports remnants of a UNDP sticker. Suddenly he pulls out a paper from the desk-top printer and starts drawing a map of southern and eastern Afghanistan. He carefully sketches Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, Khost and other adjoining provinces and then makes a large circle that includes parts of neighbouring Pakistan up to Quetta.
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Then he looks up and says with a wan smile, “Here live the unfortunate Pashtuns.”
Within Mahammod Khan’s circle lies the Gordian knot of contemporary geopolitics, untying which will not only bring peace to Afghanistan but also alter international relations far and near. Here Pakhtunwali, the ancient code that guides its numerous Pashtun tribes, potently mixes with ultra-orthodox Islam and perverse interests of various states. While the Pakhtunwali ensures magnanimous treatment of guests, radical Islam enforces untrimmed beards for men and burqa for women. It is in deference to Pakhtunwali that Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar sheltered Osama bin Laden 10 years ago, despite knowing it would invite the wrath of the bald eagle.
The Taliban, a group of largely Pashtun tribesmen, belong to this region. All international efforts are now focussed on getting this group (there are, in fact, several groups with different agendas under the umbrella called Taliban) to give up arms and help save the country from total ruin. Insurgents, many reckon, are minuscule in number.
“The Taliban does not have more than 10,000 fighters. And they do not have much support of the people,” says Elham Gharji, chancellor of Gawharshad Institute of Higher Learning, a one-year-old private university supported by Afghan intellectuals, academics and politicians.
Yet insurgency is expanding despite the US-led efforts with guns and dollars, the traditional carrot and stick. After waging an exhausting war for 10 years, America wants to go home. So do its 48 allies in the International Security Assistance Force. Managing Afghanistan after 2014, when international forces are scheduled to leave, will be the main agenda of the upcoming Bonn Conference in December. A complete withdrawal in three years will be catastrophic.
“It will certainly be civil war,” says Hussain Ali Yasa, chief editor of the Afghanistan Group of Newspapers that published the Daily Outlook Afghanistan in English and Dari.
That is why the government is hoping the foreigners will stay until 2024.
“At the Bonn Conference we expect the international community to commit another decade of support but in a more clear and transparent way,” second vice president Karim Khalili told Forbes India in an interview at his heavily guarded Victorian-style office in Kabul.
In the milieu, the one country that seems to be close to the ordinary Afghan’s heart is India. It is also the only major nation with deep involvement but no military presence. India has committed $2 billion to rebuilding efforts. It has almost completed construction of a new parliament complex. It supports scores of small, community-based development projects such as building small bridges, digging tube-wells and providing vocational training to war widows in many villages, according to India’s foreign ministry. India also recently doubled the number of scholarships to Afghan students to 1,000.
In early October, in a widely welcomed move, India signed a strategic pact to train and equip Afghanistan’s defence forces. India also wields considerable soft power through its widely popular television soaps and Bollywood movies. Its influence in Afghanistan’s politics is still disproportionately small compared to Pakistan’s and the US’, or even Iran’s, but inching up slowly. At a conference in Istanbul in early November, India’s position as an important regional player in Afghanistan was affirmed by President Karzai.
Meanwhile, the mistrust of Pakistan is increasing. In fact, many, including senior government officials, hold Pakistan and the US responsible for the state of their country. One top official in the commerce ministry points out that despite signing a trade and transit agreement, Pakistan officials routinely harass Afghan trucks and traders on flimsy grounds.
“Pakistan has always used the border as a political tool, opening and closing it as a pressure tactic,” says Waliullah Rahmani, executive director of the Kabul Centre for Strategic Studies (KCSS).
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