WARLORDS & PEACE

A weak president, untouchable warlords and a resurgent Taliban are dooming Afghanistan to an endless cycle of violence and corruption, funded by Australian aid and protected by our troops, as Eric Ellis reports from Kabul.

IT’S CLEARLY NOT A good idea to decline Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s invitation to happy hour in his northern Afghanistan lair. Parliamentarian Faizullah Zaki recently turned down his offer of a vodka, and ended up being brutalised by Dostum’s goons.

Zaki had put democracy ahead of a brutal Dostum, his one-time boss and a tyrant who has created much of the mess Afghanistan is in. The parliamentarian had voted for President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet choices, backing a new constitution that requires ministers to have better qualifications than simply being handy with a Kalashnikov.

Dostum, who fancies himself as interior minister, summoned Zaki for a “please explain”. He declined and was later found dying near the warlord’s compound. Afghanistan's attorney-general is investigating possible rape.

When Afghans joke that they can’t be bought, but rent is always an option, they have despots like Dostum in mind. In 30 years of conflict, there has barely been a village he hasn’t besieged or bombed, a side he hasn’t been on. But it was the West that provided the warlords with their greatest opportunity. After 9/11, the US equipped clan militias for their ground offensive against the Taliban.

When Washington installed Karzai in late 2001, the warlords happily joined the dollar-a-thon recovery, demanding – and receiving – senior posts in the administration, where jobs are auctioned. They are left alone to run fiefdoms with chunks of aid, including from Australia – your taxes – to “administer” and poppy fields to cultivate. Today, Dostum is army chief of staff, and virtually untouchable. His great rival, Mohammed Atta, is Karzai’s governor in hashish-heavy Balkh Province. Karzai also appointed Herat warlord Ismail Khan as his energy minister in return for Khan disarming his militia. Despite $10bn in aid to Afghanistan, Khan still can’t generate electricity - the average Afghan's biggest gripe - though he seems to do so in his home district, where his family own the grid.

In parliament, a powerful Karzai ally is Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. The al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah-linked Filipino terrorist group, Abu Sayyaf, was named in his honour by its founder, who trained under him in the 1990s. Sayyaf also invited Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996, and helped him set up his terrorist training schools. He is cited in the Washington report into 9/11 as a mentor to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as “the principal architect” of the attacks, and close to JI’s Hambali, who helped mastermind the 2002 Bali bombings. Karzai’s vice-president, Karim Khalili, leads the main Hazara militia. The president recently rehabilitated as military adviser another warlord, former defence minister Mohamed Fahim, sacked in 2004.

To leaders like George W. Bush and John Howard, waging the war on terror on the ground in Afghanistan, the Dostums, Khans and Sayyafs are convenient allies; bastards, but our bastards. But five years after 9/11, the warlords’ grip is an eloquent statement of Karzai’s weakness and the West’s mishandling of the Afghan recovery. Karzai still needs these clan thugs to maintain the fiction that he rules beyond being “mayor of Kabul”, as many Afghans scorn him. They guarantee his precarious presidency, but also cripple the country. Major donors like the World Bank and USAID deride government leaders and withhold crucial funding.

It’s a vicious circle. Afghanistan doesn’t get rebuilt; backward Afghans pine for the affordable certainty of the Taliban, who inflict casualties on foreign troops and strain western resolve while weakening Karzai, who in turn pulls the warlords tighter to him for security.

Still, though the Taliban insurgency is hardening, it will never match western militaries while their leaders stay the course. But no guns are trained on the warlords, and Afghanistan becomes a deeper quagmire for the West.

Karzai insists he wants to shut warlords out of power, appointing cleanskins like the Afghan-Australian academic Hakim Taniwal to Paktia province, a move which cost Taniwal his life in a suicide bombing last week. Karzai tries to neutralise clansmen by playing them off against each other. “We have adopted a method of inclusiveness to take this country forward,” he says. “So that everybody shares the pies, so they are participants rather than spoilers.”

But it’s clearly not working. Frustrated Afghans see a clear connection between warlord power, bad governance and the rampant corruption that even Karzai admits riddles his government, and the gathering support for the Taliban. Afghans see Karzai as compliant. He told The Bulletin in the presidential palace recently that he regretted the fact that his desire to eclipse warlords had been blocked by his western backers, who worry about ethnic strife and shifting allegiances.

The Bulletin:Unlike Iraq, the international community is not divided over Afghanistan. You have almost unanimous support in the international community, its militaries at your disposal. Surely you are in a position to be much stronger.

Karzai: Strong means what?

B: To not accommodate some of these [warlords].

K: The international community did not stand with me on these issues. They didn’t four years ago when I asked them to. I’m not going to give details, but they didn’t. I did raise these questions with the international community. They called all of us “greens”. They said “no green on green” [no internal conflict among the anti-Taliban coalition]. So it isn’t a blank cheque. I had to work through, er, internal and external factors, and take Afghanistan to where we are today.

But on Karzai’s watch, Afghanistan has overtaken Colombia as the world’s leading narcotic state. In the south, around 30,000 foreign troops – 1000 of them Australian – fight Pakistan-
and Arab-backed insurgents across a third of the country in a war a NATO general says is “more intense” than Iraq, the terrain outside their control widening in the past year. Osama bin Laden and friends roam its eastern fringes, with much local support.

More and more Afghans are nostalgic for the Taliban and an era that although harsh was peaceful, and cheaper than today’s economy where 25 million survive on less than $1 a day while many of the 50,000-odd foreigners get $500 to $1000 daily danger money. Resentment triggers riots and foreign military missions that bomb innocents feed bitterness.

Reform is hampered within Soviet-style government ranks, and aid is wasted. Aid officials say 900 Afghan railway workers draw salaries in a country with no trains. By most estimates, around half of the billions in aid simply disappears, usually into private accounts in Dubai. “Yes, there is corruption,” Karzai admits. “It’s in the whole system, in the ministries, the NGOs, the projects, in all spheres of the Afghan recovery.”

With so many criminals in government, it is unsurprising the poppy crop is in record bloom and can’t be shut down. The drug economy is now 40% of GDP. Foreign agencies say Afghanistan’s best bet for peace and reform is for Karzai to shut down the warlords. But this would risk more ethnic strife.

Capable technocrats who have returned from exile anxious to work find themselves ranged against thuggish warlords and, on another front, the mujahideen resistance leaders. The technocrats regard the warlords as heathen crooks while the mujahideen leaders dismiss anyone who sat out the conflicts overseas as soft and without credibility. The warlords? They only care if there’s an easy buck to extort from someone.

AUSTRALIA-AFGHANS who have gone back to help rebuild their country.

ABDUL KHALIQ FAZAL: Arrived in Melbourne in 1971 to become a businessman, and returned to Kabul in 2002 to join briefly Karzai as minister
of public works. Is close to Afghanistan’s king, but backed the communists that deposed him in the 1970s.

WADIR SAFI: Was aviation minister in the Moscow-backed Najibullah government, then jailed by the mujahideen. Moved his family
to Melbourne in 1998 and commutes to Kabul to work as a professor of law.

MOEN MARASTIAL: Exiled to Melbourne after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Returned to Kabul in 2002 to briefly serve as Karzai’s chief spokesman. Elected to parliament last year.

DR FAROUQ MIRRANAY: A Pashtun nationalist hardliner. Elected to parliament last year, after returning to Afghanistan from 20 years living in Melbourne, where he ran the Australian-Afghan Welfare Association.