August 31, 2002
It's hard to fault the veteran United Nations envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, for his announcement this week that there is no chance soon for a thorough or impartial investigation of the alleged massacre of more than 900 prisoners during the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban last year. In asserting that the Afghan government and its UN supporters had no ability to conduct a probe, protect witnesses or carry out a judicial proceeding in the area of northern Afghanistan where the alleged atrocity occurred, Brahimi was only stating the obvious. The site of the crime, after all, is controlled by the same warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose forces allegedly crammed captured Taliban fighters inside sealed containers, allowed them to suffocate, then dumped their bodies into mass graves.
The Afghan government of Hamid Karzai has no forces and no practical authority of its own in the region, and, thanks to the refusal of the Bush administration to support the deployment of peacekeeping forces outside of Kabul, neither does the international community. In short, the Afghan reconstruction being pursued by the United States and the United Nations - once likened by President George W. Bush to the Marshall Plan after World War II - remains so attenuated that it offers no sure means of preventing men such as Dostum from carrying out massacres, and no practical way of responding if they do.
Brahimi and administration officials tend to cast this outcome as a matter of choices and priorities - justice, said the UN envoy, sometimes must take "second place to peace and stability." U.S. officials, who continue to treat Dostum and other regional warlords as partners and allies, argue that it is better to leave such strongmen in place, plying them with aid and special forces liaisons, than to turn them into enemies. But such arguments distort the real choices.
In fact, genuine stability in Afghanistan is impossible as long as warlords are able to carry out atrocities without consequence; and the failure by the international community to respond to such acts or provide the Afghan government with the means to do so only encourages a renewal of the spiral of factional violence that dragged Afghanistan into civil war a decade ago. The real choice is to tolerate another descent into anarchy or to make the military and economic commitment needed to prevent it. Bush has repeatedly promised the latter course; but a grant of impunity to commanders who allowed hundreds of prisoners to slowly asphyxiate in a searing freight container is a large step in the wrong direction.
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