March 31, 2002
The Anxiety of Postwar Afghans
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
ABUL, Afghanistan
Recently, an American soldier approached an American reporter at Bagram Air Base, the
former Soviet air field now taken over by American troops.
"I wonder if you might press the generals for an answer," the soldier, a member of the
Army's 10th Mountain Division, said. "We really want to go home."
That is what Afghans fear most, that once the American military obliterates the last
pockets of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, they will pack up and leave.
It would not, of course, be the first time that Afghanistan loomed large in the minds of
American policy makers and then shrank to insignificance. In the 1980's, the Americans
found in Afghanistan an arena in which to confront the Soviet Union. In 1989, the
Afghans expelled the Soviets, and there was immense gratitude here for America's help
in achieving that goal. But then the Americans left, leaving behind a shattered society,
flooded with weapons, to turn upon itself.
Anyone interested in discovering how untamed Afghanistan still is need drive no farther
than the Kabul city limits. Where the pavement ends, the checkpoints begin, just a few
miles outside of town. The young soldiers at these roadblocks often use their authority to
extort huge sums of money from drivers passing through. Further down the same road,
soldiers at another checkpoint flag down cars and force the drivers to carry riders into
Kabul. The line of prospective riders, who pay the soldiers for the service, is sometimes
50 people deep.
Things get worse farther away from the capital. In the north, General Abdul Rashid
Dostum is widely believed to be receiving Iranian guns and money. His private army,
which he has used to sustain himself since the Communist era, has clashed repeatedly
with the forces of another warlord, Ostad Atta. General Atta's forces are mostly Tajik,
and General Dostum's are mainly Uzbek, and at times the prospect of open ethnic warfare
has seemed quite real.
Meanwhile, there have been repeated murmurings that one of the most infamous of
Afghan warlords, the exiled Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is attempting to stage a comeback,
possibly with General Dostum's help, possibly with Iran's. Mr. Hekmatyar cut his
reputation during the civil war in the 1990's, when his relentless rocketing of Kabul killed
tens of thousands of civilians.
That such an array of characters might threaten the Afghan government seems, at least in
some corners, lost on American policy makers. This month, American officials
announced their opposition to an Afghan request to enlarge the 4,500-person international
security force now keeping order in Kabul, and expand it to other cities.
At a news conference last week, Zalmay Khalilzad, President Bush's envoy to
Afghanistan, was asked repeatedly how he expected the Afghan government to maintain
order without the help of more international troops. Mr. Khalilzad answered that, in the
long run, a national army would be the Afghans' best hope.
When he was asked about the short run, Mr. Khalilzad gave a surprising answer: Disputes
between local warlords, he suggested, might have to be resolved by American troops on
the ground.
"We have assets and forces in all these places," he said. "One of the things they do is
discourage this sort of thing."
The prospect of American military forces intervening in tribal and ethnic conflicts is not
exactly what the Americans want, however. The military, in particular, is wary of getting
stuck in another Afghan civil war.
ON the other hand, Afghans of nearly all stripes might welcome a scaled-back security
force, enough to put 100 or so troops in the largest Afghan cities.
Despite their well-earned reputation for ferocity, the typical Afghan fighter, whether a
warlord's sepoy or a Talib on the run, holds the American military, and American
soldiers, in something approaching a state of awe. The prospect of being bombed by a B52 concentrates the mind.
But this won't answer the larger question of how to create a stable, unified, Afghan
nation. Officials in the Bush administration have said repeatedly that they intend to help
Afghanistan find its feet, that they'll be there if the chaos returns, and that the abrupt
disengagement of the late 1980's would not repeat itself. But to many Afghans here, the
assurances have an increasingly saccharine flavor. This is the same administration, long
before the events of Sept. 11, that vowed it would not engage in what it contemptuously
referred to as nation building in the more anarchical outposts of the Third World.
"The Americans are desperate to achieve their goals here against terrorism, and that is
understandable," a senior member of the Afghan interim government said recently. But
he expressed concern that Afghanistan's overall instability was being ignored in the
concentration on military objectives.
"If tensions mount here again," he said, "you will not be able to stop it. It is like a fire in
the bushes."
For months, Afghan officials, including the chairman of the interim government, Hamid
Karzai, urged that the international security force now keeping the peace in Kabul be
expanded to other parts of the country while the national army takes shape. Mr. Karzai's
fear, which he pressed repeatedly upon the Bush administration, is that without such a
force, Afghanistan's demonstrated propensity for chaos might reassert itself, and the
Afghan government will be powerless to contain it.
THIS month, however, Vice President Dick Cheney, followed by a succession of
American officials, said that the United States would oppose expanding the international
security force. Some of the countries already supplying troops for the force, including
Britain and France, have military commitments elsewhere and are reluctant to provide
any more.
American leaders said they would instead take the lead in training an Afghan army to
replace, and if need be, subdue, the dozens of armed groups that now roam the
countryside.
The Afghans desperately need a unified national army, no doubt about that. The recent
American-led battle against Taliban and Qaeda forces in the Shah-i-Kot Valley illustrated
not just that the Afghan government does not control its own territory, but that it is
incapable, without American help, of taking on a disciplined fighting force.
For the Americans, it would be no small feat to cobble together the Uzbeks, Tajiks,
Hazaras and Pashtuns who, for much of the past 13 years, have engaged mainly in
slaughtering one another. At some future point, the American thinking goes, an Afghan
national army would be able to disarm the warlords, slap down any resurgent Talibs and
guard the palace. By so doing, an Afghan army could even serve as an engine to tie this
fractious country together.
But that moment is a long way off, according to those now training the Afghan army, the
British. Assuming all goes well, they say, the first 500 Afghan recruits will reach "initial
operational capability" in a year. By American estimates, a 12,000-person force will be
ready in September 2003.
And therein lies the source of the Afghan angst: that in the end America will commit
neither the resources nor the time needed to hold Afghanistan together until it can fend
for itself.