Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 3 | Afghanistan at the Tipping Point page 3

The matches often linger over several days and the “khan” who organizes the buzkashi match effectively and elegantly without the competition dissolving, as it often does, into mayhem and brawling, emerges as the true winner. His reputation will be enhanced for years to come for such a feat. If the match does dissolve into violence, on the other hand, the horsemen will literally ride away from the khan and search out a more suitable sponsor for the next event and the khan’s reputation will plummet. “Americans should recognize the metaphor while they are here,” says Azoy.

His weathered face looked stark as he made the point and let the drama of it linger while speaking over pints of lager in the candle-lit garden of the Gandamack Lodge on a cool spring night. “The mistake [President] Bush is making here is to think freedom is some sort of baseline human aspiration. What he doesn’t realize is that for most people in the world it’s an untrustworthy idea. It’s security they want. And in Afghanistan, it’s order and control and security that is desired, just like the players in buzkashi. If the organizer of the game does not achieve that, the players will simply ride away and find a different suitor,” Azoy said.

The resistance to the Soviet occupation that Azoy and others took part in promoting was a brutal war of insurgency, and it took more than 1.5 million lives. It left Afghanistan’s mujahadeen commanders triumphant when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, but it also left the Afghan people badly and brutally suffering from the losses of war.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the U.S. turned its attention away from Afghanistan at a time when help for reconstruction was desperately needed. From 1989 to 1994, Afghanistan was disintegrating into an abyss of civil war which, by the end, left all sides shelling each other in the rubble that was Kabul.

Out of that darkness emerged a movement known as the “Taliban,” which is a Pashto word meaning simply “students.” Most of the Taliban were born in refugee camps in Pakistan and educated in the madrassas, or religious schools that were set up there. I toured those madrassas in 1994 and 1995 when the nascent Taliban, as a group, were known as much for a spirit of youthful idealism as for their signature long beards and black silk turbans.

Back then, the Taliban saw themselves as an altruistic alternative to the brutal warlords, a kind of Islamic equivalent to the New England Puritans, inspired to create a society governed by the laws of God and guided by faith. As late as 1995, when I was given a briefing by the U.S. State Department in Pakistan, the Taliban were openly presented by U.S. diplomats as an honest and preferable alternative to the corrupt and brutal warlords who had been tearing apart their own country.

But what the Taliban became was something entirely different.

The Taliban, under their leader Mullah Omar, was attempting to rebuild a country in ruins, and at the same time would spend several years in a desperate and bloody struggle to consolidate power and impose their puritanical brand of Islam on Afghan society. Eventually, Mullah Omar, who was chosen as leader for his piety, not his political or military acuity, was offered what was essentially a leveraged buyout of his government by the wealthy Saudi scion of a construction magnate who had coordinated Arab fighters to assist the mujahadeen. His name was Osama bin Laden. And in the mid-to-late 1990s, Omar took bin Laden up on the offer, allowing bin Laden and his nascent al Qaeda to establish a secure base for its stated goal of fighting a holy war against the United States of America.

And after what counterterrorism officials believe was an eight-year process of planning and coordination, bin Laden struck his most direct blow against his sworn enemy on September 11th, 2001.

Security as a Core Issue
Now, five-and-a-half years since the Taliban was toppled and al Qaeda scattered by the U.S.-led offensive, Afghanistan is still struggling to rebuild its democracy and wondering if the U.S. will stray once again—as it did at the end of the Cold War—from its self-proclaimed commitment to help it create a democratic society.

And at the Jalalabad gathering of the maliks, or tribal leaders, that I witnessed in mid-April 2007, that question was in the air. The gathering offered a colorful insight into how consensus government is woven into the ancient fabric of Afghanistan’s tribal and clan structure. The sponsor, WADAN, has earned a reputation as one of the more sophisticated Afghan organizations in trying to nurture such dialogue.

The maliks arrived by car and bus and some by tractor and donkey. They came from the small, farming villages and larger trading towns in the surrounding provinces of Nangarhar, Kunar, Laghman and Nuristan. They arrived in a parade of Pashtun plumage, their outfits serving as emblems of the tribes from which they hailed. The men, in long beards, were adorned in grand capes and wore embroidered robes and silk headscarves wrapped in elaborate ways that highlighted thick black beards and their rugged Pashtun faces. Some were wealthy traders and large land owners who brought along an entourage of attendants and others were just poor farmers struggling to provide for extended clans on tiny plots of dry soil.

The meeting of the maliks represents the ancient traditions of participatory politics in Afghanistan’s remote, tribal areas. They are the local expression of what the Westerners like to call democracy. And at this town meeting, these local leaders came loaded with what, in Washington, might be called talking points. Down front of this meeting were reserved seats for provincial governors and officials of the central government in Kabul headed by Hamed Karzai. But those seats were sparsely occupied. No governors attended, only a few deputies, and no senior officials from the government of President Karzai.

Next page: The tribal chiefs spoke primarily and most forcefully about the lack of security in the remote regions of Afghanistan.

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