Now 25, this Afghan girl has known only warfare in Afghanistan thoughout her life

This week marked the 29th anniversary of the event that set off successive cycles of warfare in Afghanistan: the Communist coup of April, 1978. The world is now witnessing the start of a 30th consecutive year of bloodshed. Skyreporter marks the occasion with a special overview article by Arthur Kent.

Our attention is usually drawn to Afghanistan by way of coups, invasions or battlefield atrocities, and by the torment these calamities inflict on the Afghan people.  The Afghans have endured, for nearly three decades, a grisly succession of savage and futile wars:  civil wars and proxy wars, wars of superpower aggression or retribution, turf wars and ethnic wars and wars the cause of which is hard to recall and even harder to explain.

Yet even for those of us who return again and again expressly to document these man-made disasters, it’s not warfare that holds us spellbound.  It’s the vibrancy, the richness and the magical atmosphere of the place.  Before Afghanistan was vilified with catchphrases like ‘war ravaged’ and ‘terrorist haven’, this was a country of enchanting beauty, of tantalizing adventure.  And though blighted by conflict, it remains the homeland of a people capable of the purest expressions of human warmth and hospitality.

The paradox of these contrasting aspects of war and peace is not easy to grasp, much less put into words.  Many visitors from the outside world conclude that Afghanistan has been profoundly misunderstood by the so-called ‘international community’ of nations.

But this misses the point entirely.  It is our own nations, our own aims and ambitions for the world that we misunderstand; more specifically, our own politicians, tycoons and militarists -- the first world’s indefatigable advocates of interference in the third world.  These are the people we empower to dream up policies in our names and enact (or inflict) them in places like Afghanistan.

Sure, the place is plagued by cruel, home-grown village tyrants, hungry for power over other Afghans.  Too often, though, these reprobates are placed on their thrones courtesy of foreign guns and money.  Successive seasons of warfare have revealed one irrefutable truth:  no matter how many inherently warlike qualities we might identify among some Afghans, it is the noxious curiosity and conniving, the greed and cruelty of outsiders that has transformed Afghanistan’s internal strife into world-class catastrophes.

How could these interlopers have been so blind?  What kind of hubris, of outright stupidity, caused the Soviet leadership to believe that military incursion, even on an epic scale, could subdue a land which history has proven unconquerable since the ages of Alexander, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane?  Why did Ronald Reagan’s America believe that simply helping Afghan resistance fighters to kill Russian soldiers amounted to stabilizing Afghanistan in the interests of the U.S. and its western allies?

Why have successive Pakistani regimes backed the most repugnant, bloodthirsty Afghan warlords?  Why have Saudi Arabians supported militants like Osama bin Laden, and what caused the Chinese leadership to pour arms into Afghanistan, while its own territories, just to the east, are themselves stalked by incipient uprisings?

These are fantastic follies:  swaggering, staggering miscalculations.  It’s as if Afghanistan first seduces, then reduces its foreign intruders to a shambles – along with its own unlucky inhabitants.  So why have unwelcome strangers been unable to figure this out before it’s too late?  Perhaps it’s because Afghanistan is, in most ways, sublimely unfathomable.

Each time the foreign visitor returns to this splendidly inspirational yet maddeningly frustrating land, he or she has to admit just how much of the country and its people remains out of reach.  To dare to call oneself an Afghan specialist is to admit, frankly, how much more there is to know and understand.

Afghanistan is not a house of mirrors.  It’s not a labyrinth or some indecipherable land that time forgot.  Instead, it is a country of variations, some breathtakingly striking, but more often of an almost unutterable subtlety.  In their language and dialect, their countenance and dress, the Afghans are vividly dramatic and alive, and yet the differences that set them apart (at times over the barrel of a gun) can be as slender as the finest silk thread in the most magnificent handmade carpet.  And it is we outsiders who too often pull those threads to the breaking point.

This pattern began to take on ominous proportions in the early 1970’s.  Afghanistan’s monarch, King Zahir Shah, was deposed in 1973 by a cousin, Mohammed Daoud, who shifted Afghanistan closer to the Soviet sphere of influence.  Within a few years, Daoud came to recognize the dangers of losing the country’s traditionally strong ties with the United States, Germany and Britain.  He had good cause:  Afghanistan’s own native-bred communists were on the rise, threatening Daoud’s vision of a progressive, independent republic by calling for outright alliance with Soviet Russia.

The worried president’s overtures to Washington to reverse this slide came too late, and in April, 1978 he was overthrown and murdered in a communist coup, led by Nur Mohammed Taraki.  Civil war broke out between the new regime (the People’s Democratic Party or PDPA) and a volatile assortment of nationalist groups, most of them guided by strict interpretations of Islamic traditionalism.  Soon, violent armed clashes were spreading across the country.

The communist PDPA, meanwhile, was beset by infighting between its two main factions, causing still greater concern to the regime’s patrons in the Kremlin. In September of 1979, the Soviet ambassador to Kabul brought Taraki together with his party rival, Hafizullah Amin, in an attempt to bridge their differences.  Amin chose a different solution:  he pulled a pistol and shot Taraki to death.  Then he named himself President.

Learning this, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev reacted with still greater recklessness.  He ordered his generals to prepare for invasion, over-ruling the many dissenting voices within both the military and the politburo.  Three months later, with a combination of stealth, brute strength and almost comical deception, the Red Army sunk its claws deep into Afghanistan.  Soon, however, the rampaging Russian bear found itself hopelessly trapped.  In both military and geo-political terms, the invasion marked the beginning of the end for Soviet expansionism and, arguably, for the Soviet system itself.

But to the victors went devastation, not the spoils of success.  Throughout the guerrilla insurrection that would eventually deny victory to the Soviet Union, the seven major Afghan resistance parties never achieved a truly viable alliance.  Using Pakistan and Iran as havens of relative safety, the Afghan mujahideen, or holy warriors, enjoyed enormous material and financial aid from the United States and its western allies.  As the war dragged on, this backing was augmented by wealthy fundamentalist sources in the Arab world, chiefly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf nations.

The guerrillas’ strength of purpose against the invaders, however, was not matched in their half-hearted attempts to formulate a plan for uniting and rebuilding the country after the Soviet withdrawal.  This blunder, for which the foreign patrons of the mujahideen are most responsible, condemned Afghanistan, and the outside world, to the chaos and violence we’ve seen ever since.

Ironically, it was the bloodied legions and chastened leadership of the Soviet Union who dealt first and most effectively with the Afghan quagmire.  The Red Army completed its withdrawal in February, 1989, an escape orchestrated under the new leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev.  This could and should have marked a new beginning for Afghanistan.  Instead, the faction-ridden mujahideen pitched their armed forces at their communist regime foes, and, eventually, at one another. 

President Mohammed Najibullah, the last in the PDPA’s line of brutally repressive leaders, ceded power in 1992.  This led to four years of savage civil war among the former mujahideen groups.  Entire quarters of Kabul, that most magnificent living relic of the ancient world, came to resemble an Asian version of post-second world war Berlin.

By 1996, the full consequences became clear of the west’s failure to urge a constructive union of their former anti-Soviet proxy forces.  A shadowy, fundamentalist movement from the southwest of the country, the Taliban, swept to power in Kabul.  Fostered by one of America’s erstwhile allies and proxies, Pakistan’s ISI, or inter-services intelligence service, the Taliban promised to restore order in the country.  Washington had become so detached from Afghan reality that the Clinton administration actually considered recognizing the Taliban.  But the new regime’s harsh suppression of women, and their lynching of the former communist President, Najibullah, forced a rethink.

As rethinks go, this period of procrastination constitutes one of America’s greatest single failures in international affairs.  It was only when a handful of zealots, indoctrinated and trained in Afghanistan, turned four American passenger planes into flying bombs on September 11th, 2001 that the policy paralysis was shaken off.  Once again, the “bleeding wound” of Afghanistan, a wound the West had ignored and allowed to fester, had oozed a hideous stain of mass murder, this time on foreign soil.  And with the grim irony of the Afghan wars, it was another troublesome foreigner, Osama bin Laden, who had pulled the trigger.

Then, suddenly, there was hope.  In November of 2001, an American-led military assault sent bin Laden, his al Qaeda underlings and their Taliban hosts scampering for the hills and deserts of the southwest.  A promising new government was created under a dedicated and articulate Afghan with no blood on his hands, Hamid Karzai.

But optimism was short lived.  The Bush neo-cons, displaying the same lack of resolve of previous administrations, chose to direct resources away from Afghanistan, this time to Iraq.  As a result, the will to succeed was sapped from the coalition of western nations that had, for a time, been on the verge of realizing the promise of a stable, reconstructed Afghanistan.  This goal remains, tragically, little more than a daunting and dangerous work in progress, both for the Afghans and for the outside world.

Copyright 2007 Arthur Kent skyreporter.com