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Afghans worsening security undercut progress { September 9 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45477-2003Sep8.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45477-2003Sep8.html
Afghans' Goals Facing Renewed Threats
Worsening Security Could Undercut Progress Toward Democracy, Reconstruction
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 9, 2003; Page A09
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 8 -- Two years after the assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the legendary guerrilla leader who fought Soviet occupation forces and Taliban rule, Afghans fear time may be running out to achieve Massoud's dream of a unified, democratic and moderate Muslim nation.
While slow but steady progress has been made toward holding national elections, revamping the security forces and reviving the war-ruined economy, Afghans and foreign observers say deteriorating security conditions -- including crime, regional warlordism and the recent emergence of Taliban guerrilla forces based along the Pakistani border -- are threatening to sabotage the country's recovery.
Massoud, an intellectual and military commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001, by two men posing as journalists. After the Taliban was overthrown in a U.S.-led invasion, Massoud's image dominated the political landscape on posters and billboards.
"If Ahmed Shah Massoud were alive, he would want elections, the rule of law and no foreign intervention," Massood Khalili, a former close aide to Massoud, declared at a memorial conference Sunday. Another speaker pointedly added, "The time has come to move from the politics of individuals to the politics of institutions."
Gains and Losses
On paper, and to some extent in practice, Afghanistan has moved gradually toward those goals over the last year. Work on a draft constitution is nearing completion despite time-consuming disagreements over how Islamic or secular the text should be. A national ratifying assembly is expected to be held in December, and national elections are still slated for sometime late next year.
The building of a new, multiethnic national police force and army is well underway, though progress has been painfully slow. Reforms in the Defense Ministry, the most powerful stronghold of Massoud's former militia associates, are finally taking shape, with new professional standards to be instituted and 22 top officials to be replaced through a competitive nationwide search.
Visible strides have been made in economic reconstruction and investment, though most major projects are being funded by foreign aid. Hotels and restaurants have opened all over Kabul, public buildings are being refurbished, some roads are under repair and tiled mansions have sprouted in affluent districts. Inflation is low, the currency is stable and commerce is booming.
Yet the growing threat of political violence and criminal lawlessness, some of it linked to Islamic radicals, has dominated recent news here and raised fears that after two decades of conflict and five years of repressive Taliban rule, precious momentum for change may be slipping from President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed coalition government.
"Security has been the real disappointment, and we are far, far behind. The state can exist without a lot of things, but it cannot exist without a professional military, police and justice system," said Anwar Ahady, the central bank governor, whose outlook on the economy and other aspects of Afghan recovery is far more optimistic.
In the past year there have been dozens of attacks on foreign aid facilities, killings of several aid workers, bombings of civilian buses and military jeeps, reports of rampant police abuse and government corruption, a rapid revival of opium poppy cultivation, the virtual paralysis of a program to disarm and demobilize private armies, and determined resistance to central authority by several powerful regional militia bosses.
Despite the presence of 8,500 U.S. combat troops and a multinational peacekeeping force in the capital, an aggressive and organized guerrilla force has become active during the past two months in areas close to the border with Pakistan.
The guerrillas, who occupied a mountainous region of Zabol province for nearly two weeks, are led by members of the Taliban, the hard-line Islamic group that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001. They have been joined by others, including a militia led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former Afghan minister who turned against the Karzai government and has been on the run for several years. Last week, Taliban spokesmen said their fighters now also include followers of Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf, another Islamic militia leader, and former president Burhanuddin Rabbani.
Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special representative for Afghanistan, said he was deeply concerned that the growing lack of security could jeopardize the democratic political process mandated under a U.N.-sponsored pact after the fall of the Taliban in November 2001. In a report to the U.N. Security Council last month, Brahimi dismissed elections here as useless without a safer environment and stronger government institutions.
"We have come out of our naive belief that elections are a magic cure for all ills," he said in an interview here last week. "People need security -- not just a lack of shooting, but no one telling them how they should vote, or else. . . . If we really want to help countries in transition, what they need first is the rule of law."
Opposing Threats
Ironically, Afghanistan's peace is now under threat from two adversarial forces. One is the revived Taliban militia and its Pakistan-based allies. The other comprises Islamic groups that once fought the Taliban but may now have an equal stake in disrupting the political and security reforms that stand to exclude them from power.
The use of Pakistan as a launching pad by renegade forces has also raised the specter of an old threat that obsesses and unnerves many Afghans. While Pakistani authorities insist they are trying to curb cross-border terrorism, many Afghans have long viewed Pakistani interference as the source of all their ills, including the Taliban movement that was spawned in Pakistani religious schools.
In recent weeks, U.S. forces have conducted several major combat operations and sustained bombing raids in rugged, hilly border areas, and U.S. military officials have reported killing as many as 200 enemy fighters and successfully forcing the rest into retreat. On Sunday, President Bush promised to seek billions of dollars in new military aid to combat terrorism in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but efforts to reform or co-opt regional Afghan militias have taken a back seat to other U.S. priorities. And while the recent takeover of peacekeeping leadership here by NATO has raised Afghan hopes for a more aggressive international military presence, no foreign nations have been willing to take on an expanded security role outside the relative safety of the capital.
"They need to go out and collect every single gun. Only then will people feel secure," said Sarwad Borak, 55, a white-spattered painter who was working on a new traffic police booth at a busy urban intersection. "We have security in Kabul, but not as soon as you reach the outskirts," he added. "Where they are no international forces, there is no security."
Massoud's former militia allies, the ethnic Tajik coterie from his base in the Panjshir Valley, have long dominated power in Afghan security ministries, wielding his name as an iconic cudgel to resist political and military reform sought by the United States, the United Nations and Karzai.
Despite lingering public skepticism, the Tajiks insist they have now become part of the solution and fully support the institutional modernization they resisted in the early stages of post-Taliban rule.
Gen. Mir Jan, Defense Ministry spokesman, said the institution has every intention of professionalizing its standards, though he cautioned that change is much harder to introduce in the countryside, where militia leaders have run fiefdoms for years.
"We can't ignore the fact that for 25 years there was no law. The commanders were the authorities and each had his own kingdom," Jan said. "The stronger the central government can become, the weaker the local powers will become, but we must move slowly and be mindful of traditions."
'Between Fear and Hope'
Karzai, who commands no military muscle of his own and is protected by a force of U.S. commandos, has tried to use diplomacy and deal-making as peacemaking tools, with mixed results. One notable success was his recent removal of a thuggish provincial governor, who now sits in Kabul as a minor cabinet minister.
Karzai's public efforts to distinguish between "good" and "bad" Taliban members, and perhaps woo some of the group's former leaders into the government fold, backfired badly with the public. While the president remains a popular figure, many foreign and Afghan observers privately say they have been increasingly disappointed with his indecisive leadership.
As Afghanistan prepares to move toward its first democratic elections, anti-democratic and radical Islamic groups -- both those in hiding and those in public political life -- are becoming bolder in their challenges to a progressive but weak central government that still suffers from what Brahimi called the "original sin" of having been hastily cobbled together in an international, post-9/11 panic nearly two years ago.
"There is a great danger that we will have elections, but that the fundamentalist forces will mobilize and there will be no space or security climate for alternative views," said Vikram Parekh, an Afghan specialist with the nonprofit International Crisis Group.
While few Afghans or foreign observers believe the Taliban could manage a return to power, the movement's recent surge of guerrilla activity has come as one more blow to an uncertain, war-weary nation that already has more than enough to worry about -- from absorbing millions of returning refugees to curbing the power of local warlords and finding the right balance between Islamic traditions and modern, liberal values.
"People are living between fear and hope," said Khalili. "The hope is that we have a government, we have international support, we have a road map of reconstruction that has started. The fear is that we see the emergence of an enemy that six months ago everyone thought was completely broken. Maybe people's hopes were too high before," he added, "but they are much less now."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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