Drawdown in Afghanistan

Editorial
The Frontier Post
With Afghan President Hamid Karzai’ identification of his country’s seven parts for first transition, the process of drawdown on foreign occupation forces and transfer of security responsibility to the Afghan army and police has been set in motion to start by mid-this year and complete by 2014. Nonetheless, this isn’t much of a big deal, as most of these areas have largely been at peace; whatever foreign forces were there, they were there not for need but for their unwillingness to fight in actual war theatres. Two of them, Bamiyan and Panjshir provinces, have been Tajik strongmen’s bastions; Mazer-e-Sharif in the north is ruthless Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s lair, Herat in the west has been regional warlord Ismail Khan’s principality, more under his local adversaries’ than Taliban’s assailments; and Mehterlam has been an island of peace in the deeply-disturbed east. Kabul certainly has been in the eye of storm from day one, bearing a lot of deadly terrorist violence and daring Taliban assaults over this past decade. Its naming for transition does mean something, although the question which Karzai himself too has all through shied off asking or answering remains still unanswered as to why this province fell so easily to Taliban’s insurgency when the troops of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) stayed put unshakably for almost six years in Kabul, the province’s principal city and the country’s capital. Equally quizzical it is that even now from the transition has been kept out its Surobi district despite the region is swarming not only with coalition forces but the Afghan soldiers and police as well. That certainly doesn’t sit well on the mind in the face of claims of both the Afghan officialdom and the coalition military command of scoring successes in curbing and crushing the militancy and insurgency all over the country ever since the occupiers’ military and civilian surge strategy. In fact, one wouldn’t read much even in the inclusion of Lashkar Gah, Taliban-infested Helmand province’s capital city, in this first transition phase. This could only be a psychological device to impress as much the Afghan insurgents as the troops-contributing countries’ publics getting increasingly edgy and sceptical about this Afghan war, given the reports in wide circulation about the occupiers buying safety from local warlords and militants. In any case, this safety buying is not something new. It has been very common with the occupiers all through. Much evidence to this effect has already come to the public light. And much more surely will come out once the whistleblowers get into the act and start spilling the beans on the shenanigans of occupiers’ militaries and agencies. Already, the British are out scrounging the bookshops’ shelves off a devastatingly revealing work of an insider on their poorly-equipped army in Afghanistan and its civilian killings. The others too will be prowling in their own bookshops in time to snatch damning accounts of their armies’ exploits in Afghanistan. But, for once, Karzai should get out of his own prank and come to terms with the harsh realities in his land. His tirade of Afghan Taliban’s sanctuaries in Pakistan has become too trite, too obsolete and too puerile an idiom to stand, so deceptive has it been from the word go. If there is no indigenous militancy and insurgency problem, who then the occupiers and his own forces are fighting in villages and even in cities of Afghanistan, not just in the south or east but also in far-flung north and west? Had indeed he been real and truthful to himself, and not a mere Americans’ particularly their CIA’s, lackey, he would have raised the right demands to coalition authorities and his country’s condition would have been consequently gratifying a lot alleviating by now. More foreign forces at the outset, a robust earliest recruitment, training and arming of a national Afghan army and police, a decisive government voice on utilization of international economic aid, and, above all, a fuller representation of the country’s Pakhtun majority, traditionally a kingmaker, would have helped him bring his war-torn nation to peace, security and stability. He indeed had a chance to be Afghanistan’s de Gaulle. He frittered that away by playing occupiers’ and their allies’ pawn. Does he imagine what an Afghan army packed up with Tajiks and Hazaras would mean after transition in Pakhtun regions, given the chronic ethnic Pakhtun-Tajik antipathy and Pakhtun-Hazara confessional loathing? Instead of chasing red herrings, he must now face up the ground realities. That would serve his nation’s interests best.