Sharing A Laugh: Parliamentarians In Kabul

I love this image of the Afghan Parliament. Laughing, open faces, and women’s faces prominent among them. Despite the daunting challenges of rescuing their nation after three decades of war, the men and women of Afghanistan’s first freely-elected parliament can still make one another laugh.

Paradoxically, this chamber is both one of the West’s greatest gifts to the Afghan people, and a symbol of the political straightjacket strapped and buckled around them by their supposed international benefactors. Why? Because the defacto leader of the so-called “international community” in Afghanistan - and it is still, sadly, the Bush administration that wears that crown – persists in making short-term compromises that result in dire long-term consequences.

The Bush administration’s policies are eroding the country’s fledgling democracy. In the past five years, so many dark personalities have been empowered by the White House and its people on the ground in Afghanistan that most of the smiling, honest faces you see in parliament have little prospect for advancement to positions of authority.

That’s the way the warlords, druglords and their cronies want it, of course. And it would appear to fit President Hamid Karzai’s agenda, too, since he has yet to appoint any of the genuinely reform-minded independent MPs to crucial positions in, for instance, the justice system.

Why appoint outspoken critics of corruption, such as Ramazan Bashardost or Shukria Barekzai, to a post like Attorney General? They’d be sure bets to go after the biggest criminals in government. President Karzai, though, evidently believes his current AG, Abdul Jabar Sabet, is a better choice. Sabet chases down low-level bureaucrats accused of pocketing thousands of dollars - even though every student, merchant or shoemaker you meet on the street can reel off a dozen names of men who’ve magically come into fortunes, three homes, expanses of land, and private militias.

And why appoint someone to the Culture and Information Ministry who might really try to nurture more open, democratic communications, and enshrine freedom of speech in law? Why indeed, when you’ve got a man like Karim Khurram at your service. A fundamentalist throwback, Khurram is currently crafting a Big Brother media law that will curtail press and broadcasting liberties.

This week I spoke with another of Hamid Karzai’s cabinet ministers – quite another kind of minister. He reminded me how Attorney General Sabet got his job – promoted by Bush administration advisors who owed the man a plum for giving the Guantanamo Bay detention camp a clean bill of health.

“It was a compromise with common sense,” he says, “a short-term arrangement that has left us with a person who is unsuited for high office. Now he has one of the top positions in the justice system, and for how long?”

How long? It’s the question that shouts out from the pages of every public opinion poll conducted in Afghanistan. How long will it be before the “international community” recognizes the consequences of the Frankenstein’s monster of an administration that has taken root in Kabul?

The capital is haunted by old warlords, whose paths are littered with blood and debris, and yet who rise again, like zombies awakened by the golden touch of their foreign patrons, or drug bosses, or some other scoundrel, seeking amnesty, with influence to pedal.

There’s one ray of hope, though, piercing the gloom of Karzai’s castle. Most of the faces in Afghanistan’s year-old parliament aren’t just cheerful. They’re sincere, and they’re not giving up. Proportionately, there’s probably a higher ratio of cabinet-ready talent awaiting promotion in Kabul than in the parliaments of London and Ottawa – and most certainly that fantasyland on the Potomac.

So here’s an original thought:  why don’t we help promote the right people, instead of the expedient ones? Then all we’d have to contend with in Afghanistan is stability. And success.