Why it's not working in Afghanistan; no peace, democracy, reconstruction.

[rodeodance]

Aug 30, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HH30Df02.html

Why it's not working in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones

Remember when peaceful, democratic, reconstructed Afghanistan was advertised as the exemplar for the extreme makeover of Iraq? In August 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was already proclaiming the new Afghanistan "a breathtaking accomplishment" and "a successful model of what could happen to Iraq". As everybody now knows, the model isn't working in Iraq. So we shouldn't be surprised to learn that it's not working in Afghanistan either.

The story of success in Afghanistan was always more fairy tale


than fact - one scam used to sell another. Now, as the administration of US President George W Bush hands off "peacekeeping" to NATO forces, Afghanistan is the scene of the largest military operation in the history of that organization. Personal e-mail brings word from an American surgeon in Kabul that her emergency medical team can't handle half the wounded civilians brought in from embattled provinces to the south and east. American, British and Canadian troops find themselves at war with Taliban fighters - which is to say "Afghans" - while stunned North Atlantic Treaty Organization commanders, who hadn't bargained for significant combat, are already asking what went wrong.

The answer is a threefold failure: no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.

Doing things backward

Critics of US Afghan policy agree that the Bush administration, in its haste to take out Saddam Hussein's Iraq, did things backward. After bombing the Taliban into the boondocks in 2001, it set up a government without first making peace - a scenario later to be repeated in Iraq.

Instead of pressing for peace negotiations among rival Afghan parties, the victorious Americans handed power to Islamists and militia commanders who had served as America's stand-in soldiers in its Afghan proxy war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Then the Bush administration staged elections for these candidates and touted the result as democracy. It also confined an International Security Assistance Force, made up largely of European troops, to the capital, creating an island of safety for the government, while dispatching warlords of its choice to hunt for Osama bin Laden in the countryside. ............