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Afghanistan: Progress since
the Taliban
Ahmed Rashid
Published online: 02 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Ahmed Rashid (2006) Afghanistan: Progress since the Taliban ,
Asian Affairs, 37:1, 31-35, DOI: 10.1080/03068370500456868
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03068370500456868
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AFGHANISTAN: PROGRESS SINCE THE TALIBAN
AHMED RASHID
Ahmed Rashid has been the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia
Correspondent for several international newspapers and magazines over the past
three decades. He has won numerous awards, in his native Pakistan and
elsewhere, and is the author of three best selling books, including Taliban
which was translated into 25 languages and sold over 1.5 million copies. In
2004, he was appointed to the Board of Advisers to the International
Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva for a period of four years. His most
recent book is Jihad the Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia.
This is an edited version of a talk he gave to the Society on 7 September 2005.
This is a momentous time for Afghanistan. Following the presidential election
held in October 2004, the country is preparing for the rst parliamentary elec-
tions to be held under the new government. The election on 18 September will
be the culmination of a fast paced political process set in place since the war of
2001 which removed the Taliban regime and led to the Bonn agreement being
signed by Afghan groups in December 2002. The US invasion and military
dominance of the country, and the international peacekeeping operation
created the basic conditions for this political process. In the face of continuing
ethnic and tribal rivalries, the conicting ambitions and resistance of warlords
and violent opposition from still undefeated elements of the Taliban regime, a
Loya Jirga was convened in June 2002, re-starting a new political process with
the activation of Afghanistans traditional representative institutions. The elec-
tion of a President was held under the conditions agreed by the Loya Jirga for
this and the parliamentary elections. The current President, Hamid Karzai, is
universally regarded as clean, not corrupt and without blood on his hands.
These are undoubted successes in a mixed picture in Afghanistan, in which
the record shows pluses and minuses since the fall of the Taliban. I will start by
taking a broad look at these relative successes and relative failures. The fast
pace of the political process must be considered a success, though I myself
believe that the pace has been too fast for the good of Afghanistan and the
long term strength of its political institutions. It is a positive achievement
that a legitimate government has been set in place, acknowledged and recog-
nised by the international community. Warlordism remains a problem but the
warlords no longer have the power to threaten the government. Many of
them have been accommodated into the government. There are 20,000
United States troops in Afghanistan, and 10,000 separate coalition forces
under NATO now acting as a peacekeeping force. Despite President Bushs
ISSN 0306-8374 print/ISSN 1477-1500 online/06/010031-5 #2006 The Royal Society for Asian Affairs
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/03068370500456868
Asian Affairs, vol. XXXVII, no. I, March 2006
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disavowal of a US commitment to nation building, a process of national recon-
struction and nation building, however far short of what is needed, has been set
in motion. The foundations of a local security force have been put in place with
50,000 trained police. The beginnings of bureaucracy and judicial system have
been set up and are functioning where none existed before. More than 60,000
armed militia, the legacy of years of international conict, resistance and
civil war, have been successfully demobilised and disarmed.
An ambitious social programme has been successfully initiated. From zero,
ve million children, boys and girls, have started attending school again. Three
million more school places are needed but the scale of this new educational pro-
gramme and the pace of its implementation are unprecedented in a Muslim
country. Remarkably these schools, set up along secular lines for both sexes,
have been welcomed enthusiastically. Despite years of Taliban dominance
and propaganda, there has been no signicant demand for a purely religious
madrassa-based educational system. There are the beginnings of a rudimentary
health system. The reality of inadequate delivery compared to the high expec-
tations aroused contributes to widespread frustration and anger. But for all its
inadequacies and shortcomings it is making a perceptible difference to the
quality of life.
But there are also minuses in the Afghanistan record. The rst is that the
Taliban is again growing in strength. It is important to remember that the
Taliban were not defeated in the US invasion. They retreated to Pakistani terri-
tory where they were given complete license to rebuild their organisation. The
Taliban leadership is based in Pakistan, from where they conduct hit and run
raids inside Afghanistan. The movement appears to be run largely by Al
Qaeda operatives from outside Afghanistan. They have been joined by the
Afghan Pashtun Islamist warlord and one-time faction leader, Gulbuddin Hek-
matyar, who had been supported by the CIA and Pakistans intelligence agency,
the ISI, in the anti-Soviet resistance movement in the 1980s and was active in
the civil war that followed. The relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda
is a murky one but it is becoming closer. A Taliban delegation was sent to Iraq
to train followers of the Jordanian Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab-Al-Zarqawi. In
Afghanistan itself 60 US troops have been killed in Taliban attacks in the past
year, more than in the previous three years put together.
A second minus is that opium production has soared since the end of the
Taliban regime and 87 percent of the worlds heroin supply is now sourced
in Afghanistan. This outcome has been abetted by mistakes in economic plan-
ning by the new regime, to which I will turn later. Despite a 20 percent
reduction in the land under opium cultivation, favourable weather conditions
have meant that production has remained stable, and high. The drugs trade
and contracts for aid and reconstruction both feed a high level of corruption.
The third relative lack of success lies in the fact that ethnic divisions in
Afghanistan have not diminished in spite of the change from warlordism to
the new political leadership. President Hamid Karzai, as a Pashtun, has
support from both Pashtun and non-Pashtun communities, but most other pol-
itical leaders draw their support solely from the ethnic group to which they
32 AFGHANISTAN: PROGRESS SINCE THE TALIBAN
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belong. To some non-Pashtun leaders of the former Northern Alliance Hamid
Karzai is seen as a front for an essentially non-Pashtun power structure. The
potential for an anti-Pashtun and anti-Karzai opposition developing within
the political system is signicant. There is an urgent need for national recon-
struction projects that have not just local benets but which also have a
benign effect on the ethnic divide. An effective central government is against
the interests of both the former warlords and the Taliban. Both are destabilising
factors. The former warlords have nevertheless been taking part in the political
process, standing as candidates in the presidential elections and putting forward
their nominees for the parliamentary elections. They have cultivated and been
cultivated by foreign backers. President Karzai has publicly criticised both
Russia and Pakistan for interfering in the Afghan political process.
Meanwhile the implementation of an international commitment to recon-
struction in Afghanistan has been slow. The United States initially blocked
the idea of an international peacekeeping force when the momentum and inter-
est was relatively high. Now it is very difcult to get governments to commit
troops and attempts to forge a united peacekeeping force are fraught with dif-
culty. The amount of international aid for reconstruction is not enough, and I am
critical of the international communitys record in this area. The money given is
not always spent effectively, or spent at all. No major power project, or water
and irrigation project, has been undertaken. There is a big nancial shortfall.
Finance has to be found to pay for an army of 70,000 men. Afghanistan provides
no more than 50 percent of the budget for its own administrative needs. The
expensive process of holding elections is funded entirely by international aid.
There is no programme or process of accountability in place. A succession of
reports by international agencies has highlighted human rights abuses and
other failings. Is the glass half full or half empty?
The main factor in preventing a stronger international commitment was the
United States diversion of its effort and interest from 2002 onwards to Iraq.
Within three months of the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the United
States was pulling out from Afghanistan. From March/April 2002 there was
a shutdown in the search for Osama Bin Laden. A policy was implemented
of maintaining the status quo in Afghanistan to enable the United States to
turn its attention to Iraq. Nobody in Afghanistan realised that this was in
preparation for the invasion of Iraq. A decision that proved catastrophic for
Afghanistan was only claried when the invasion took place.
United States policymakers had concentrated on waging the war but had not
considered how to wage the peace. British and European ofcials and military
commanders in Afghanistan had a major role and a strong educative inuence
on the United States. General McColl in particular as the rst ISAF commander
played a key role in this regard, (McColl is currently the British Prime
Ministers Special Envoy to Afghanistan). The prevalent British and European
view was that unless efforts were put into nation building, Al Qaeda agents and
inuence would return. But the United States was not interested in institution
building and in the face of this neglect the European and British interest
made little headway.
AFGHANISTAN: PROGRESS SINCE THE TALIBAN 33
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From the summer of 2002 Britain lost its inuence on Afghanistan by lining
up too quickly with the United States over Iraq. US resources only started
coming back into Afghanistan in the winter of 2003 and early 2004. The 20-
month hiatus in the ow of international aid was a tragedy for Afghanistan.
In this period little was done to showcase the benets of the overthrow of the
Taliban regime. President Karzai begged President Bush to show the Afghan
people that the international community was committed to reconstructing the
country. After much pleading he managed to persuade the Americans to
rebuild the Kabul to Kandahar highway.
In September 2004 President Bush wanted the Afghan Presidential elections
to be a success story. It was claimed by his critics that this was because close to
his own re-election bid he wanted to show that good progress was being made in
Afghanistan. I would not put my money on that argument. But 20 months had
been lost and this gap had allowed the warlords and the Taliban to return to
argue that the international community had taken its eye off the ball. They
were operating from their refuge in Pakistan and found a response in the
Pashtun areas of south and east Afghanistan. Events in Pakistan had radicalised
the border regions. The Taliban have become more popular in Pakistan than
Afghanistan. It is a reversal of the situation pre-9/11. Concerted efforts at
development may succeed in eliminating the Taliban threat in Afghanistan.
For Pakistan it will be much more difcult.
Afghanistans relations with neighbouring states remain a crucial element of
its political geography. Non-Pashtun minority groups who formed the opposi-
tion Northern Alliance have received support from their regional neighbours.
They are inclined to regard President Karzai as a g leaf for the real inuence
of their own ethnic communities. Reducing the threat of warlordism requires a
reduction in the inuence of warlords, such as General Dostam and those
Pashtun warlords who had been on the US payroll, some as recently as
200304. After Karzai had sidelined warlords such as Defence Minister
General Fahim and the Herat warlord General Ismail Khan just before the pre-
sidential elections, it was hoped that he would continue that process into 2005.
That did not happen, partly because Karzai did not have American support to
get rid of more warlords. Warlords have become businessmen, corrupt and
heavily involved in the drug trade, to the benet principally of Al Qaeda and
other extremists. President Karzai should have sought mutual support agree-
ments from his neighbours. Instead he has signed strategic pacts with the
United States and with Britain, pushing forward this unnecessary policy to
the annoyance of his neighbours. The urgent need for regional cooperation
and support has been ignored.
Much is made of the fact that in 2000 the Taliban had banned the production
of opium. The real reason for this policy was that in the face of plummeting
opium prices the Taliban wanted to boost the market by creating a shortage,
thus raising the price. The successor government has neglected agriculture
where big money is needed for the revival of production. The demobilisation
of the militias and the return of refugees have underlined the need for invest-
ment in agriculture to reduce dependency on opium cultivation and the drug
34 AFGHANISTAN: PROGRESS SINCE THE TALIBAN
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trade. The United States has preferred quick impact projects rather than invest-
ment in roads, markets, dams and small irrigation projects. Farmers have been
left with no choice but to go into drugs. The investment hiatus for 20 months has
worsened their predicament. The lack of success of British-sponsored counter-
narcotic policies highlights one of the casualties of US policy.
The state of the economy remains extremely precarious. A budget of $600
million pays for government salaries. Only 50 percent of that is raised locally.
The development budget is three or four times that size, and is funded entirely
from outside the country. To tackle the lack of coordination between different
donor governments and external agencies Britain has urged for more support to
be given to the Trust Fund set up in 2002 to provide a pool of resources to
support government strategy and planning. The division between the United
States and Europe and other geopolitical factors are outside Afghan control,
and they have an adverse impact on the viability of the countrys economy.
The irony is that the United States is spending $1 billion every month on US
forces in Afghanistan. It would take the equivalent of 20 days of US military
expenditure to meet the level of aid and investment required for Afghanistans
reconstruction.
The people of Afghanistan are vibrant, active and energetic. They are fed up
with war and conict. They have centuries of experience of business and trade
with their oriental neighbours and beyond. The return of skilled and educated
Afghans from the western diaspora provides an invaluable bank of human
resources. Productive returns can be achieved from a very small investment.
The outlook for Afghanistan justies more optimism than Iraq. A great deal
can be done with very little. I am optimistic that if the right decisions are
made by the international community, by Europe, the UK and by the USA,
Afghanistan can achieve substantial progress.
AFGHANISTAN: PROGRESS SINCE THE TALIBAN 35
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