Afghanistan at the Tipping Point

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	Azbul Abdul Salam, also known as “Reverend Rocket.” ©Seamus Murphy

“Yes, we must eradicate so much,” noted Muhammad. “We must eradicate poppy. But we also must eradicate senseless bombing,” he said to thunderous applause in the auditorium. “We must eradicate the killing of civilians. There is so much we must eradicate,” he added as the maliks clapped and nodded with knowing approval and appreciation for Muhammad’s tone of dissent and honesty.

Over a lunch of Afghan bread baked over a fire and accompanied by rice and mutton and eggplant, Muhammad, a college graduate and long-time headmaster at a school in his province, said he had been a malik for the last twenty years. Speaking through an interpreter, he had a lot more to say, as well: “We have 5,000 years of history. We have our own civilization and our own institutions. Look around you: this is our democracy. We will only have success if it is our own democracy, with our own customs. We will not have success if it is a Western view of democracy. For us, democracy is not sending us movies from Hollywood with sex and bringing alcohol. These are things against our culture and tradition. We do not want that kind of democracy.” He added, “But before we can bring in our own democracy, we have to have security. You cannot have one without the other.”

After the meeting, the journey back to Kabul led down a newly constructed highway, funded in part by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The highway, which, during my previous visit more than five years earlier, was a potholed dirt road that was nearly impassible at many points, was now smooth as glass as it rolled through a pleasant river valley. But it was still dangerous. Police checkpoints along the way were being targeted by insurgents with rocket-propelled grenades. The police held up the convoy I was traveling in and then ran to hide behind small mud-brick posts. They looked up at a mountain ridge from which the attacks appeared to be coming. Finally, after a half hour of waiting to see if there would be more rocket attacks, the police waved the convoy through, though it was clear that we were now traveling at our own peril.

Back in Kabul, inside the wall of security that surrounds the central government buildings, Dr. Farooq Wardak, the head of parliamentary affairs, agreed that Afghanistan was indeed at a “major turn in the road” during the spring of 2007. The Taliban offensive had been persistent. The violence and the death toll were mounting.

For many in Afghanistan, there was—and is still—a raw wound caused by the aforementioned March 2007 deaths of civilians brought about by U.S. Marines who had defied rules of engagement and fired indiscriminately after a roadside bomb in the Nangarhar Province. As of this writing, the U.S. military had referred the case for possible criminal inquiry. In May 2007, a U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Colonel John Nicholson, apologized for the incident, saying he was “deeply ashamed.”

Wardak is one of Karzai’s closest cabinet members and he was candid in his assessment of where things stand at the moment in Afghanistan, particularly in light of the killing of civilians and several false arrests and imprisonments in the rural provinces that have caused an uproar. He agreed with the assessment of others that such mistakes threaten to undermine the successes of the international community in Afghanistan, and he warned that such incidents could easily spark a brushfire of resistance that will catch the Americans by surprise.

Said Wardak, “The Americans are making a lot of mistakes. Many of the insurgents are Taliban, but many are not. They are people who have simply gone to the side against American forces because they want security.”

In relation to what he described as scores of cases of false arrest and imprisonment that have come to his attention, Wardak said, “The American troops are relying on bad intelligence reports and falling victim to tribal rivalries, with one tribe providing bad information against another. There are scores being settled and the Americans are oblivious to this…They will have to gain a more complex understanding of this place if they are going to help us make it work.”

As an example, Wardak discussed the very word “democracy.” He explained that for Afghans, particularly in remote provinces, “democracy,” as a word, is suspect. After all, it was the Soviet-backed government that changed the official name of the country in 1978 from the Republic of Afghanistan to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

To this day, in the minds of many Afghans who fought so hard—and lost so many fathers and sons—to force the occupying Soviet military from their land in the 1980s, the word “democratic” has a very negative connotation. Instead, the Pashto phrase “wolas waki,” or “rule of the people,” is preferred, said Wardak.

Confronted with the sense that Afghanistan is indeed at a tipping point, a U.S. official said that the balance between providing security and developing democracy was a complex equation. “It is like a Rubik’s Cube,” the official offered, adding, “All of the pieces need to fit together, and they need to fit together all at once.”

The same official ended a briefing by quoting from memory Rudyard Kipling, who understood the challenges of the presence of empire in Afghanistan perhaps more than any writer since: “And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’’’

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