Afghans in ruin of Kabul's Darul-Aman palace, January 2010 (AFP)

Squaring the circle

The Western community have got to stop reducing Afghanistan to a domestic policy issue and deluding themselves and the public, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung: viz. that their objectives can be achieved, that they can go home soon and, above all, that there will be a happy end in Afghanistan.

Published on 29 January 2010 at 15:32
Afghans in ruin of Kabul's Darul-Aman palace, January 2010 (AFP)

Everybody’s talking about Afghanistan – and actually meaning their own interests: the war in the Hindu Kush is merely the backdrop in Germany for domestic wrangling. Church officials are now joining a fray they had largely disregarded for the past eight years. NATO defenders see the credibility of the alliance under fire. And the chancellor is practising a political egg-and-spoon race, while her defence minister’s white lies about the Kunduz report [on civilian casualties in the botched airstrike] have now caught up with him.

All this has little to do with Afghanistan and Afghans. That’s a shame, really, in view of the innumerable corpses rotting in the Hindu Kush mountains since 1979. And it’s about time the Western community – including the Germans – got down to the nitty-gritty, because they are mired up to their necks in the Afghan mess. The question is what can be accomplished and what cannot. This is the magic Afghanistan square, in other words: peace and “nation-building”; democracy and the rule of law, replete with women’s rights; nationwide development; and an end to the geopolitical ambitions of foreign powers that have been slugging it out there for centuries. As in economic theory, these four objectives cannot be achieved simultaneously. So everything cannot and will not be alright. Because it’s not possible.

In Corner 1: Those bent on “nation-building” and reconciliation will have to give traditionalists and fundamentalists a say in Afghanistan. Together they form what is at least felt to be the majority. Therefore – Corner 2 – democracy and the rule of law will have to make room in large swaths of the country for traditional Islamic conceptions of law. Women get left out in the cold here: formal education and jobs, or getting rid of the burqa, cannot be readily achieved with the traditionalists on board, much less with the Taliban. Corner 3: Nationwide development. That will work only if the village elders and radicals play ball: where there is shooting, there can be no building. The elders are traditional to the core, and the Taliban don’t go for democracy. If we wish to reconstruct and unite, we will have to cut a deal – at the expense of the growing number of modern Afghans. Corner 4: Foreign interference. That will only end when none of the ethnic groups believes any more it needs outside help in the form of arms. The precondition is reconciliation and a piece of the power for all – see above.

Withdrawal is wrongheaded

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In a word, the four goals are mutually exclusive. To achieve anything, we will have to make some ugly compromises, give up certain objectives and set priorities. After all, civil wars seldom end before one side has come out on top and really taken over. The warning that Afghanistan will relapse into civil war if the international troops pull out is outmoded: the civil war is going strong – uninterrupted. Which is why “just-pack-up-and-go-home” slogans are just as wrongheaded as any hope of military success against the Islamists.

One way or another, the Taliban are going to get a piece of the power. They are the sons of a lost generation: raised in miserable refugee camps in Pakistan, with hardly any “formal education” outside the Koran, which they have learned by heart – and “with the heart”. Offering these Taliban “rehabilitation programmes” and jobs sounds good. But it will take years and won’t convince many. A lost generation remains a lost generation. Afghanistan needs more time than Angela Merkel’s domestic agenda allows. That is another aspect of the Afghanistan tragedy.

Coalition

War weighs heavy on the mind of Europe

After eight years of war, the European public is getting tired of it. In Germany, the government is about to ask the Bundestag to send another 850 reinforcements to Afghanistan, even as the latest polls show two-thirds of the country want to bring home the 4,280 German troops stationed there. In France, opposition members are airing doubts about the legitimacy of the intervention in Afghanistan and refusing to send reinforcements. The Netherlands recently announced plans to pull out of Afghanistan in 2010. Even the British public, hitherto staunchly behind the government on this issue, are now beginning to drag their feet. “All the European nations calibrated their Afghanistan policy to their relations with the United States, rather than in terms of their own means and interests,” regrets Nick Witney, former chief executive of the European Defence Agency.

Headache for the US army

Apart from the British, German and French armies, which, with 10,000, 4,280 and 3,750 troops respectively, make up the second, third and fourth-largest contingents of the coalition force, some of the smaller countries’ contributions to the war effort constitute such a purely symbolic motley crew (250 from Albania, 50 from Finland, 10 from Bosnia, etc.) that they are merely making things more complicated for the NATO command. Especially with all the language barriers in a 43-nation coalition. And then there are the “caveats”, restrictions certain capitals impose on their armed forces in the theatre of operations. In a word, managing certain European contingents is rather a headache for the US army. It is true, however, that the Americans, who are leading the military effort in Afghanistan, where they will soon have 100,000 men in uniform, as against under 40,000 from Europe, are actually keener on obtaining a political symbol than military punch from their allies.

Isabelle Lasserre, Le Figaro(Paris).

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