AFTER THE FIGHTING
A Mob Hit in Kabul
The warlords won't help us win the peace in Afghanistan.
One of the finest military officers I know recently returned from six months in Afghanistan. He describes the warlords and their followings as "the five mob families" from America's past, each with its turf, feuds and occasional taste for cooperation with one of the other mobs. Last Saturday, the mob hit one of Afghanistan's vice presidents.
My friend, who is an officer of great experience as well as a man of conscience, believes we should deal with and through the warlords, since that is the most effective way to make things happen. I believe he is tactically right, but strategically wrong.
Americans want quick results. But if we expect quick results in Afghanistan, we might as well pack up our gear and come home now. Worthwhile results will require long-term engagement. The process will be endlessly frustrating and it will not be cheap. Yet even if such engagement ultimately fails, it will be less expensive than the alternative. The Muslim world does not need another country run by the mob.
We may find it useful to work with the warlords now and then. But we must beware our tendency to do what is easy today, though destructive tomorrow. During the Cold War, we fell into the habit of supporting dictators and strongmen who made things easy for us. It would be all too simple to do that in Afghanistan. And the mob can be very seductive.
Certainly, the rule of the warlords and the relative autonomy of their tribes or clans has been the way things worked in Afghanistan for centuries. But our goal should not be to reclaim the country's past. We need to help the Afghans develop a moderately more humane, somewhat more tolerant, slightly more promising future. And even our most realistic expectations are apt to be frustrated in the short term.
More government officials will be assassinated. Various factions will seek to undercut our influence even as they attempt to exploit us and turn America's might against their local adversaries. We must not expect to discover virtues among Afghan politicians that we cannot find among our own. Positive results may require a generation to take root.
None of this is what our country or the Bush administration wants to hear. Washington would be only too glad to hand off the Afghan tar-baby to European ditherers and to allow Kabul to turn into yet another vacation home for the salaried tourists of the world's nongovernmental organizations. But, instead of seeing Afghanistan only as a liability, we should regard it as a crucial opportunity.
The Islamic world between Cairo and Karachi badly needs a success story. One of the most powerful sources of Muslim hatred toward the U.S. is simply Islam's failure to generate a single healthy state. Muslims are, indeed, humiliated, and it little matters that they have humiliated themselves. The region desperately needs a model of success.
At first glance, Afghanistan doesn't look promising. Broken by generations of war, diseased, impoverished and under-educated, with less infrastructure in its provinces than Europe possessed a thousand years ago, it seems a doomed country. But the paradox is that Afghanistan has fallen so far it has hit bottom. War hasn't worked. The religious rule of extremists failed and embittered much (though not all) of the population. And there is a large émigré population in the West that has experienced alternatives.
Certainly, Afghanistan is not going to turn into Orange County overnight. But in a land so devastated, incremental improvements can make a tremendous difference. America's continued engagement, with an adequate number of troops, reasonable funding and, above all, a long-range plan could have a profound impact--a return far in excess of our investment. For too long, we have given extremists and reactionaries free rein in the Muslim world. We surrendered the battlefield to our enemies in advance.
If we could help Afghanistan progress, however haltingly, toward the rule of law, rather than accepting continued domination by those "mob families," if we could further human rights, assist in building a rudimentary system for secular education and support the rebuilding of the nation's basic infrastructure, we might finally be seen as a positive force by at least some in the region. Instead of being viewed as a country that only bombs Muslims, we might be seen, at last, as a country that builds, too.
The keys to success in Afghanistan will be commitment, patience and reasonable expectations--all difficult qualities for our ebullient democracy. But even a moderate success would prove that the Muslim world possesses forward gears and isn't stuck hopelessly in reverse. Progress in a poor country such as Afghanistan might even embarrass those Arab states possessed of oil wealth into conceding a few human and political rights to their own populations.
In our own country, people turned to the mob because they needed help or protection the government did not provide, because they felt defenseless--or because they had tangible needs that went unanswered. Ethnic ties and the bonds of kinship were strong, and prejudice played into the hands of the gangsters. On a much grander, deadlier scale, that is a description of the situation in Afghanistan today.
We must not choose the easy path, embracing the notion that the warlords embody some magical "tradition" we dare not violate. Respect for local values does not mean surrender to local blackmail, and our worst enemies will be the diplomats and advisers who warn us that "that's the way it's always been done in Afghanistan." Furthermore, we cannot listen to the defeatists--the same voices who warned us last autumn that Afghans could not be defeated by our "pampered" military. We must know the past, but only fools and anthropologists adore it. Afghanistan has more history than it needs. It is time for us to help that country focus on the future.
Mr. Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, is the author, most recently, of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World" (Stackpole, 2002).
