Global Policy Forum

By Rajan Menon*

Finding bad news about Afghanistan is easy: The press brims with stories of its travails. For starters, there's the Taliban, which remains a threat, particularly in the south and east. Though scattered by American firepower in late 2001, its fighters continue routinely to kidnap and kill foreign aid workers and to attack Afghan and Western troops. Moreover, Afghanistan today is less a state than a precarious balance-of-power system in which warlords with private armies rule the provinces, paying the central government scant heed. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, derisively known as "the mayor of Kabul" because of his minimal power, has survived one assassination attempt already and moves about cocooned by American bodyguards.

Afghans remain dirt poor and largely illiterate, lacking the barest necessities, such as clean water. There are few modern roads; electricity is unavailable in most places and spotty even in Kabul. Now famine looms; a relentless drought has dried up rivers and irrigation canals. This destitution has revived poppy cultivation, which was suppressed by the draconian Taliban, and opium is again the principal export.

Amid the torrent of such dismal news it's worth remembering that life in Afghanistan was far worse not long ago. Recalling Afghanistan's terrible past lends perspective and keeps its achievements in view, which is essential lest pessimism culminates in its abandonment by the West — yet again.

First the history. Afghanistan has been trapped in war for over 20 years. From the end of 1979 until the spring of 1988, 100,000 Soviet troops defended a pro-Soviet, Marxist political party that had seized power in 1978 and was soon besieged by an assortment of Islamic insurgents. During that brutal war, 1 million Afghans died out of a total population of 16 million. Four million others fled to squalid refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran. Schools, clinics and irrigation systems were demolished in a country that had been poor to begin with. Millions of land mines littered the country, killing and maiming Afghans long after the Soviet military had departed; widows and orphans were ubiquitous, as were people missing limbs. Afghanistan was trying to crawl out of this hell when I traveled there in 1988. But once the Islamists finally uprooted the Soviet-backed government in 1992, they turned on each other, plunging Afghanistan into renewed violence, which ended only when the Taliban took control between 1994 and late 1996.

Many unsuspecting Afghans welcomed the new rulers as liberators, but they proved to be pitiless tyrants. Semiliterate men with medieval minds, they saw Afghans as mere means to the larger end of creating a pristine Islamic society designed from a literalist reading of the Koran. Adulterers were stoned to death. Music and movies were banned. Muslim women were forced to wear the veil; non-Muslims had to wear special markings on their clothes to identify them as unbelievers. Such was the life Afghans knew until the Taliban was toppled in a U.S.-led war in December 2001. So when we tally Afghanistan's problems, let us remember where it has been for the last two decades.

That Afghanistan remains whole is itself a minor miracle. Defying many predictions, it has not fractured into warring Pushtun, Uzbek and Tajik statelets. Despite continuing instability, the United Nations estimates that 2 million refugees have returned home. Millions voted in October's presidential elections, braving threats from the Taliban. Karzai, interim president since December 2001, was elected and was sworn in last week - this in a country with neither a record of democracy nor any of the preconditions (such as a robust middle class, ethnic harmony and a high level of literacy) typically linked to it. An Afghan army that will answer to the government is (slowly) taking shape, and with luck, legitimacy will be backed by the power of enforcement.

Today, Afghanistan's problems cannot be solved without generous and sustained help from outside. Indeed, they cannot be seen apart from external neglect. After the Soviet army left Afghanistan in 1989, the United States, which had helped arm the mujahedin (as the Afghan resistance came to be known) against the Red Army, essentially walked away. Afghanistan became a focus of attention again only after 9/11. This negligence accelerated Afghanistan's ruin. This time around, the United States and its allies must stay engaged.

The 9,000 NATO troops who make up the International Security Assistance Force must be increased. They must settle in for the long haul and expand their presence beyond Kabul and points north. And Afghanistan needs to get more of the billions of dollars pledged at an international conference held after the rout of the Taliban. If we fail to deliver, Afghanistan's long-suffering people will slide back into the abyss. And 9/11 should remind us that their fate is hardly separable from our own.

About the Author: Rajan Menon is a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and a fellow of the New America Foundation.

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