It was rather nice inside the bubble. I met some tough and smart guys, who had become good at collecting local intelligence and who mingle the job of collecting it with the job of distributing aid. One officer I met was carrying a briefcase with $150,000 in cash—“for schools,” as he put it. I got a briefing or two, and found opinion divided on whether it was wise for the central government to try to undermine old Ismail Khan before the elections. I found it generally to be true that American soldiers—especially the ones this “far from the flagpole” and way out on the western frontier—felt less valued and less noticed since the invasion of Iraq. Eventually, I got a hitchhike from a Humvee, which took me to the airport, where I secured another hitchhike from a U.N. evacuation plane, flown by enormous bronzed South Africans. This international bubble, in theory, stretches protectively across the whole jagged country. But, boy, is it pulled thin and tight, and you don’t want to be there when it punctures or leaks. Not many days after I had left, President Karzai did dismiss Ismail Khan as governor of Herat—which implied that perhaps the American Embassy had after all been behind the attacks on him—and at least nine of the bubble’s offices were burned out.
What exactly is a warlord? The species clusters into two main groups: local pashas such as Ismail Khan, roughly content to harvest their own fiefdoms, and ethnic or confessional leaders with big ideas. Into the latter category would fall the grisly, sadistic figure of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once a favorite of Pakistan and the CIA but now a wanted man who combines Taliban rhetoric with extreme corruption and opportunism. Yet we would also find the late Ahmed Shah Massoud, the brilliantly charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, who was both a Tajik tribal commander and a devout Islamist. He it was who tried to warn the West that the Taliban were harboring Osama bin Laden, and he it was who was murdered by al-Qaeda suicide killers on September 9, 2001, to try to ensure that their upcoming assault on New York and Washington would be matched by the extinction of resistance within Afghanistan itself. I shall not forget those three days three years ago: It must have seemed to the fanatics that god was laughing along with them, and that everything was ordained in their favor. One must never again feel such defenseless shame.
Pictures of Massoud are now everywhere in Kabul, his brother is Karzai’s vice-presidential pick, and a large monument is being built in his honor. But there is an older and surer definition of a warlord: He is someone who can control a piece of road and force you to pay a rent or a toll to pass along it. Roll a few rocks and oil drums onto the highway, place some gun-wielding desperadoes next to the barrier, and begin your extortion. It is the fear of this that keeps many Afghans ghettoized in their miserable villages, and that also keeps many humanitarians and diplomats penned up in the safety of the cities, or traveling only within the bubble. It is the same fear that Kipling called upon (you didn’t think I was going to leave him out, did you?) in his extraordinary Afghan poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier”:
A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail …
Strike hard who cares—shoot straight who can
The odds are on the cheaper man.
You can still see homemade jezail rifles, along with fearsome daggers, in the front of shops along Chicken Street and Flower Street in Kabul—placed there mainly to give the handful of tourists a cheap thrill. But it takes only an inexpensive improvised roadside or handheld weapon to put fright into the aid workers and election supervisors who have to leave the compounds or venture through the arid rural communities where 70 percent of Afghans still try to exist. In the town of Ghazni, for example, a young Frenchwoman named Bettina Goislard was cut down in broad daylight last November while working for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. Not far away, a bomb exploded in a mosque—a mosque!—while voters were attempting to register the names they could barely write.
I will venture a prediction: The Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power. They were able to seize Kabul in the first place only because the country had been reduced to “Year Zero” conditions by civil war, and they are now so much hated, and so heavily outgunned, that they can’t expect to do any better than make life miserable in the more wretched areas of the South. Vicious though their tactics are, they don’t show any sign of having a plan, or a coordinated leadership, or a directing brain. (If Osama bin Laden is still alive, he has a very faint and unconvincing way of demonstrating it. He doesn’t even issue fiery sermons anymore. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, got the job of making the September-anniversary rant this year, and of issuing the false claim that Americans were cowering in their trenches in southern and eastern Afghanistan. And Osama used to be so voluble …)
I selected Ghazni just now for a reason: I paid it a visit just as the registration of voters was being completed. My expedition from Kabul was remarkably swift and easy, because the place lies along the new highway from the capital to Kandahar: the southern city that may well have been named for Iskandar, local name for Alexander the Great. The South is still in the danger zone; it abuts the near ungovernable Pakistani tribal areas, and even in Kandahar itself the female registration for the election is little more than half the national average. But two years ago that journey would have been an extremely rugged and hazardous undertaking that could consume at least a whole day. Now you can drive from Kabul to Kandahar in six hours. (Pedal to the metal, I hit eighty miles per hour on the straight and level, than which the car itself could do no more.) Roadblocks become redundant or archaic in these conditions. People sometimes sneer at the Kabul-Kandahar highway, saying that it’s still unsafe and that, in order for it to be completed in time for President Bush to celebrate it in a speech, a couple of inches of blacktop had to be omitted from its surface. Well, I have now driven along a good bit of it, in daytime and darkness, and perhaps I was just lucky. It’s patchy in places, but backup gravel and Tarmac are both being heaped lavishly on the roadside. Even more noticeable is that enterprise is beginning to rise up along the way—from gas stations to the outlines of factories and construction sites.
It is mainly a superstition from our own past that can absolutely ruin the hopes of those who wait on line in the sun and hope against hope that their votes will count. We can still get a failed state or a rogue state in Afghanistan, if we really work at it. Nothing is crazier, when you see it up close, than the stupid “war on drugs.” Nobody believes in it for a second. The military specialists all think it is a waste of time, or at best (as the saying goes) a distraction from the hunt for al-Qaeda. The farmers all think it is an assault on their only viable crop. The warlords just can’t believe their luck. There are whole areas of the country, recovered from Taliban control, where the “hearts and minds” battle is being lost every hour of every day, with dumb attempts to root out the only thing that grows, and the only thing that sells. After years of withering drought, and even more years of devastating crop burning and desolation, which would you plant: a vine that takes five years to grow to maturity—grapes used to be Afghanistan’s main crop export—or a poppy that yields pods in six months? It has been calculated that as much as a fourth of the country’s G.D.P. is opium-related, and that the crop gives a livelihood to millions in the countryside. Some of these are coerced into poppy farming, but until another economy has been created, or this one recognized, it’s futile to be emulating the Untouchables. Thirty years of experience have not yet taught us that Westerners will buy the fruit of this poppy at almost any price, and that therefore Easterners and Southerners will stolidly continue to cultivate it. Many people think that the Taliban did a better job of drug “interdiction,” which is a clue in itself to the madness of this calculus. In fact, the Taliban “banned” the trade in order to drive up the price of the existing tonnage that they held. The U.S. government actually grows opium in Turkey for our domestic painkiller market: Why not give Afghans a slice of the bu
siness?
Afghanistan is not in our past: Its astonishing inhabitants are our formerly abandoned and now half-adopted relations. And one can so easily fall for a place where everybody thinks about sex, where bombing has blasted a society out of the Stone Age, and where opium is the religion of the people.
(Vanity Fair, November 2004)
First, Silence the Whistle-Blower
IF THE TIME ever does come when we look back on our intervention in Afghanistan as a humiliating debacle, this past weekend may well be identified as one of the moments when the calamity became irreversible.
In the prelude to the 2004 elections in that country, I went around looking at the places where local people were being instructed in the principles as well as the mechanics of voting. It was like watching a very tightly furled bud beginning to burgeon and unfold. Officials of various international organizations had been hoping, for example, to attract a certain percentage of Afghan women to brave their former oppressors and come out to register; the facilities for this were overborne by the sheer number of women who spontaneously showed up. Minority groups that had been despised and butchered by the Taliban—such as the Hazara, a Shiite community with some cousinhood to Persia—were mobilizing to register. The press and television, entirely new to many Afghans, were showing some vivid scenes of democracy and some useful debates. On the actual day of voting, there was some complaint about the indelible ink for the fingertips being not so indelible as all that, but vast numbers of people braved the “night letters” from the Taliban and stood in line in the sun for the chance to cast a ballot. No procedural imperfection could quite destroy the impression that Afghans were acquiring the all-important idea of a free and competitive election.
The dreary, nasty farce of August 20 has almost eclipsed that memory. A ridiculous, banana-republic style shenanigan produced, in its first round, an outcome that did not survive even the most cursory scrutiny. On the very first inspection of the polling stations and the ballots, it was laughably easy to discover polling stations that never opened but that recorded vast turnouts and ballots that had gone straight from the printing press into the pockets of President Hamid Karzai and his associates—one of whom, Azizullah Lodin, doubles as the chairman of the absurdly named Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan.
That would be bad enough, were it not for the craven complicity of the U.N. mission in Kabul. Perhaps as much as $200 million of the international community’s money was allotted to ensure that the Afghan people could vote, but when vast numbers of them did not or could not, and while many others of them managed to do so, in effect, five or six times, there was no alarm call from the responsible U.N. officers in Kabul. Or perhaps I should rephrase that: One officer did complain that there had been (a) widespread fraud, and (b) government collusion in same, and (c) U.N. indifference that amounted to complicity. This was Peter Galbraith, a senior American diplomat who was then the deputy special representative of the U.N. secretary-general, that scintillating figure known in song and story as Ban Ki-moon. Galbraith complained that Kai Eide, the Norwegian head of the U.N. mission, had been indifferent to the flagrant bias shown by the local Afghan officials who were in effect spending the United Nations’ money to buy votes for their political boss. Eide in turn complained to Ban, who immediately obliged by firing Galbraith. Thus we cannot quite say that nobody involved in this fiasco and fiesta of corruption has yet lost his job—it would be almost true except that the main whistle-blower was fired as the first order of business.
It wouldn’t now matter whether there was a runoff or not, or a “contested” election—there can’t be any sentient Afghan who believes that the process is anything much more than a cynical fix. It is not as bad as the recent trampling on the voting rights of the people of neighboring Iran, but we are supposed to have a slightly more elevated standard than that (and the mere comparison, of course, goes to show how high the stakes are).
The Taliban, one imagines, can barely credit their luck. They are opposed to voting on principle, as something un-Islamic, and they are especially and viciously opposed to voting by women, but now they don’t need to stress that. They can simply help swell the chorus of cynicism and contempt.
The panic measures proposed to redress this dreadful outcome have in some cases been as bad as the original disease. Admitting far too late and far too grudgingly that fraud had necessitated a second round, Kai Eide left us faced with a choice between a hasty second vote overseen by the same crooks or a postponement until after the brutal Afghan winter—another free gift to the forces of ruin and fanaticism. Some also proposed a ramshackle “interim” government or a face-saving cobble-up between Karzai and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah (so nice they named him twice). All this represents an attempt to avoid facing the obvious fact that for months of this year, and with our money, the Afghan people were cheated and betrayed in their hour of most urgent need.
What will the big friends of the morally infallible United Nations say now, I wonder? And how will Congress and the president and the leaderships of the other donor and sponsor states account for what happened to the funding they authorized? I have written dozens of times about how none of the so-called parallels with Vietnam are any good (al-Qaeda a foreign import to Afghanistan; no Vietcong threat to American cities; you know the rest), but there is one thing that did disfigure South Vietnam and is essential to avoid in any case: the commitment of American forces to a government that contrives to be both enriched and bankrupt at the same time and makes its own people want to spit.
(Slate, November 2, 2009)
Believe Me, It’s Torture
HERE IS THE MOST CHILLING WAY I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.
Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.
It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:
“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.
As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death.”
On the night before the encounter I got to sleep with what I thought was creditable ease, but woke early and knew at once that I wasn’t going back to any sort of doze or snooze. The first specialist I had approached with the scheme had asked my age on the telephone and when told what it was (I am fifty-nine) had laughed out loud and told me to forget it. Waterboarding is for Green Berets in training, or wiry young jihad-ists whose teeth can bite through the gristle of an old goat. It’s not for wheezing, paunchy scr
ibblers. For my current “handlers” I had had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma, but I wondered whether I should tell them about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades. I was feeling apprehensive, in other words, and beginning to wish I hadn’t given myself so long to think about it.