Is This Your First War? (25 page)

Most at Massoud's tomb were skeptical about the chances of reconciliation with the Taliban. “All Afghan people want peace, but we must be clear about who is a friend and who is an enemy,” one said. “What I think is that there is only one type of Taliban. And if they come back, it will be like it used to be.”

“Wars always end with negotiations,” Malin, the judge, said. “There should be negotiations. We're not opposed to negotiations. But the Taliban are not ready to accept the constitution. They are not willing to accept human rights and Afghanistan as a democratic country. The Afghan people will never join with a group that they fought for so long, that accepted terrorism and stomped on human rights in Afghanistan.”

Downriver from Massoud's grave, I stopped at the home of Ahmad Zia Kechkenni, an Afghan-Canadian whose wife and kids now live in Toronto. Kechkenni is a nephew of Abdullah Abdullah. His family has deep ties to the disbanded Northern Alliance, and to Massoud's anti-Soviet guerillas before them. We sat in his shady, flower-filled garden next to the river, drinking tea and eating almonds. Two family members lie amongst the shrubs and flowers close by. They were killed in a Soviet bombardment and buried there because it was too dangerous to take the bodies to a cemetery. A ceasefire between Massoud and the Russians was signed in the same house.

Kechkenni acknowledged the ethnic dimension of the movement opposed to peace with the Taliban. The predominantly Tajik Northern Alliance, he said, had accepted a Pashtun president in Hamid Karzai. But the Taliban “show some traditional Pashtun values. We are living in the twenty-first century. We have to come out of these tribal locks. Other ethnic groups are willing to do that.” He accused Karzai of pandering to the Taliban to gain Pashtun support. “It goes back to this tribal thing, that only one ethnicity has the right to lead Afghanistan.”

Faheem Dashty, Kechkenni's brother, an Afghan journalist, and a former member of the Northern Alliance, had come to visit. He, like Massoud Khalili, was with Ahmed Shah Massoud at his assassination. Dashty's hands were webbed with scar tissue, and he said his memory was affected by the blast.

“There are two extremes that come together,” he said, leaning back into a white plastic chair. “On this side we believe in human rights, women's rights, freedom, justice, democracy. But from that side they are fundamentally against these values. They believe in a fundamentalist Islamic system, which doesn't actually have anything to do with the teachings of Islam. If we reconcile, one side has to sacrifice its values, either this side or their side. The people of Afghanistan will not accept that. Their side will never sacrifice its values either. Our options are either to defeat them or lose the war. There is no third one.

“If we lose this war, Afghans will not lose much. What do we have to lose? A few hundred kilometres of asphalt road. A few hundred schools. Of course, we may lose our lives, as we have before. But our allies, the international community, will lose a lot. Because they have a lot to lose. The civilization that they have built up over hundreds of years, they will lose that, because this land will become a centre of terrorism. The war that we have to fight now in Kandahar and Helmand and sometimes in Kabul, then we will have to fight in Paris or Barcelona or Ottawa. It doesn't mean that you will have active war. But they will follow you there. Before 2001 they may have had this fear that if they do something, they will be attacked. But if we lose this war, they will not have this fear. Because they will already have defeated us.”

Not all Afghans believe reconciliation with the Taliban is so fraught with risk. Shukria Barakzai is an Afghan member of parliament who helped draft the country's current constitution. She's Pashtun but eschews ethnic labels. “We didn't have that disease before the civil war,” she said. “Then everyone talked about ethnicity, Shia, Sunni, whatever.” Barakzai scoffed, however, at the notion that Karzai might win over Pashtuns by pandering to the Taliban. Pashtuns, she said, are the insurgency's greatest victims.

During the Taliban's rule over Kabul, regime thugs beat Barakzai in the streets. But she didn't cower, instead establishing a secret school to educate girls. Today, like all Afghan women with any sort of power, Barakzai is regularly threatened by the Taliban. Reaching her office meant passing numerous checkpoints. We met in a small ground floor room with smudged walls. Barakzai breezed in, cheerful, speaking in slightly accented English. She had wide eyes and a round, open face. It seemed she could barely be bothered to keep a thin length of cloth draped over the top of her head. It would slip back to her neck, she'd hike it up a few inches, and it would fall down again.

“Reconciliation is not an option. Reconciliation is a need,” she said.

“Let me explain what I have achieved since ten years and don't want to lose,” she continued. “I have achieved the beautiful, wonderful constitution. And I'm proud of what I drafted for my nation. I'm really proud. That constitution says what rights the Afghan citizens get, and what jobs and duties the government has. We have to keep it. There will be no compromise on it.”

Other Afghans who also cherish the new constitution and the rights it enshrines fear those rights might be bargained away. Barakzai said this isn't possible. “This is not something that will be in the hands of Hamid Karzai. The Afghan constitution is not a Karzai diary book that he can change, write in, or remove pages from.” And if he tries, she said, Afghans like her will not stand for it.

“I'm the one who during the Taliban years had my own girls' school under their regime. I am the one who wore the burka for five years by their orders. I'm the one who ran a women's organization under the Taliban regime when everything was closed and there was bad discrimination. Why? Because I'm a woman. I was the one who would not keep quiet at the time. How can you say that today I will accept whatever they want to order me? No way. Maybe in a dream.”

After ten years of Soviet occupation and a few more fighting the puppet government they left behind, in 1992 Abdul Rahim Wardak, a mujahideen commander, found himself approaching the outskirts of Kabul, with the government in the city collapsing. The trip to reach the capital from Jalalabad in the east had taken longer than he had thought, he recalled when telling me about it, because he himself had destroyed part of the road during earlier fighting. But he pushed on until the Kabul Valley opened up before him, a clear path to the capital. There, at about eight o'clock in the morning, he confronted a couple of Communist generals.

“Before that, I was always thinking if I get my hands on them I will kill them,” said Wardak, who was now Afghanistan's defence minister. Aged seventy or so, Wardak was a large man with an expansive belly that wasn't quite contained by the vest of his three-piece suit. He had laconic and world-weary mannerisms. A few weeks before we met, an armed attacker stormed the Defence Ministry and made it to the second floor where Wardak has an office before he was shot dead. If this rattled Wardak, he didn't show it. He often sighed and chuckled; mostly, it seemed, to himself.

“They killed my brother and my uncle, and so many others. Two dozen cousins,” he continued, speaking of the Afghan Communists. “But then I saw them there, and they were in a weak position, and they were reconciling in peace. And I was totally different.

“You see, the source of all evil here was the Communist Party, which brought all these miseries upon us. If they didn't do the coup, we will not be here. So they initiated everything — more than two million Afghans were killed, and there were hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans and handicaps, right now also. We were able to forgive them. So what do you think the chances are of forgiving these others?”

The Taliban, however, were not asking for forgiveness. All that spring, their bombing attacks continued, as efforts to strike some sort of peace deal persisted, stubbornly, blindly — driven by the West's desperation to get out of Afghanistan and the inertia of ten years of unconditional support for Hamid Karzai.

“This thing has become too personalized,” said Mahmoud Saikal, a former deputy foreign minister under Karzai and a longtime diplomat, when we met in his Kabul home.

“We should have supported processes. We should have supported systems. We should have supported the democratization of the country. We should have supported strengthening the rule of law and the institutionalization of Afghanistan, as opposed to looking for a figurehead and putting whatever we have behind this person and believing everything will be fine. It's not.

“To me, a peace deal means absolutely nothing. What is needed is to make sure this country functions. It looks like we've put all our eggs in one basket now, looking for peace with the Taliban. And I can tell you one thing — that after a lot of effort and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars, you may reach that peace deal. But you will have lost the Afghan people.”

I left Afghanistan just ahead of the last Canadian combat soldiers in the country. Canada agreed to keep about a thousand troops in Afghanistan until 2014 to train Afghan security forces. Other nations, including the United States, announced plans to scale back their troop commitments as well. Insurgents bombed a hospital. They strapped explosives on an eight-year-old girl and blew her up at a police checkpoint. In September 2011, two Taliban met with former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had been tasked by Karzai to negotiate peace. The envoys said they wanted to discuss it. At least one had explosives hidden in his turban, which he detonated, killing Rabbani.

Five years of attempted peace negotiations with the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have failed. And it is difficult to imagine a more explicit demonstration of the Taliban's disdain for a negotiated peace than their murder of the man trying to achieve it. The West tried not to notice. In January 2012, the Taliban said they would open an office in Qatar where negotiations could take place. Both Karzai and Washington backed the plan. Former warlords, non-Pashtuns, who helped topple the Taliban in 2001, meanwhile joined forces in a new opposition movement. They were unarmed, for the time being. But Karzai's systematic undermining of Afghanistan's parliament had weakened peaceful means of dissent. Old civil war divisions were re-emerging. More conflict loomed.

One might argue that it is not the job of Western soldiers to keep Afghans from each other's throats. Our concern should be with our own safety. Osama bin Laden is dead and teenaged foot soldiers fighting to extend the Taliban's reach in Helmand province aren't plotting to blow up Toronto. This is true, up to a point. While international jihadists do fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, their most significant base is next door in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan. But the border between the two countries is porous and was exploited by local insurgents and foreign radicals before and after the September 11 attacks. Surrendering Afghanistan re-opens the safe haven.

But what if large numbers of foreign soldiers are counterproductive in a fight against the likes of al-Qaeda? If the point of our presence in Afghanistan is simply to track down and kill terrorists with global reach, could this not be most effectively done through the use of spies, special forces, and air strikes? It's a tempting proposition. A light footprint feels less like an occupation. Fewer soldiers on the ground mean fewer casualties. And air assaults cost less than lifting a country out of ruin. Such a model has also had some success in Pakistan, where missile strikes have eliminated dozens of top Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders.

It will never be enough. Terrorists are able to establish themselves in areas where they have secured support or fear from the local population. Our strategy in Afghanistan, therefore, should not be simply to kill Taliban, but to deny them the support or supplication of Afghan civilians. This cannot be accomplished with missiles from unmanned drones, which too often kill innocents as well as the intended victims, or with snatch-and-grab raids by teams of special forces. It requires resource-heavy nation building. This takes time and blood, aid workers and soldiers. Friendly villages need to be protected. Schoolteachers must feel safe. If our goal is to deny sanctuary to terrorists who wish to harm us, we can't desert Afghanistan's civilian population.

Even if we could pack up and leave Afghanistan to its fate without incurring increased risk to our own safety, we shouldn't. There is an ethical case for staying. We can't intervene everywhere. Millions die through violence or neglect all over the world, and we don't have the will or ability to do anything about it. But we do in Afghanistan. Despite all our blunders and all the years of war, most Afghans don't want to once again live under Taliban rule. Thousands of Afghans have died, and continue to die, fighting to prevent their return. The international mission there has local legitimacy. More importantly, it is morally right. The Taliban's massacre of the Hazaras was genocidal, and their treatment of the female half of the population should be intolerable to civilized people.

“Afghanistan is a beautiful country,” an Afghan refugee in Dushanbe told me in October 2001, before I first crossed the border into Afghanistan. “It is worth loving.”

I didn't understand him when he said it, and maybe I never really did. Meaning can often get lost in translation. But after being there I might have said something similar, that Afghanistan deserves all the emotions it draws from the people who live there, or even from those of us who only pass through — the longing, the hope, the frustration, the anger, the hate, and the love. It is also a heartbreaking country. It seems to chew up everything that is thrown at it. But it has been abandoned too many times already and doesn't deserve to suffer that fate again.

W
ael
Abbas slumped over his coffee in the restaurant of the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa, located about equidistant from the imposing National War Memorial that dominates Elgin Street and a smaller, more confused stone tribute to human rights farther down the road. Despite the Lord Elgin's impressive façade, it's a bit rundown inside, and the restaurant was almost empty. Abbas, an Egyptian blogger and strong critic of then-president Hosni Mubarak, had been flown to Ottawa by a Canadian government-funded human rights organization to speak at a conference on journalism in dictatorial regimes. He stirred his cup and looked tired and listless. It was October 2009. There was a breeze and weak sunshine. Leaves on maple trees had changed colour, turning the Gatineau Hills across the river from Parliament Hill into a rolling expanse of mottled red and gold.

In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak had ruled for almost thirty years. It didn't look like he would be leaving any time soon. The country received about two billion dollars in aid annually from the United States, most going to Egypt's military. Popular dissent appeared dormant, or stifled. Yet Abbas, thirty-five years old, smart and innovative, had chosen to confront the government. His exposure of police brutality and political corruption had resulted in his arrest and continued harassment by state officials. He had been effectively blacklisted from working for Egyptian media and as a result still lived with his parents and wrote most of his critical journalism online. I asked him why he bothered.

“I'm working because I think something can be achieved. If I became pessimistic, I would stop and flee the country. I don't want to,” he said.

“I need my country to be a democratic country, to be more free, to have more representation of real people in the parliament, to have less power in the hands of the president, to have real presidential elections. This way we'll be able to combat corruption, and we'll be able to fight poverty, unemployment, and lots of problems that Egyptians are facing, especially the young.”

That those who live in the region will risk everything for a more democratic life is not always easily accepted in parts of the world where such freedoms are common. In 2004 I returned to Oxford from Iran, where I had spent much of my time with dissidents who had been beaten and jailed, and who still gambled with their lives to secretly meet with me. They knew they would be punished for it, while I endured no more than a couple of brief flights before I was lining up at my college cafeteria for lamb's liver and peas.

One of my fellow students stood ahead of me. We had attended public school together, but until bumping into her at Oxford that year I hadn't seen her since we were twelve or thirteen years old. Her hair was uncovered then; now her face was framed by a close-fitting hijab. She is a bright and cheerful woman, and I was happy to reconnect with her. I told her how impressed I was by those Iranians who willingly suffered to defy the religious thugs running their country.

“Oh, Mike,” she said, exasperated, as if I were a misguided little boy. “That's what they want you to believe.”

She was referring, I'm assuming, to Americans she believed exaggerated the desire for freedom felt by ordinary Iranians. Yet democrats in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East were not foreign pawns, nor were their hopes misplaced. Dissent among tens of millions of people in the Islamic world had been swelling for years, fuelled by unemployment, corrupt and repressive rule, lack of freedom, and the enlightenment and organizing activism opportunities provided by the Internet and online social networking. This percolating defiance and desire for change exploded first in Iran in the summer of 2009, when hundreds of thousands stood up to bullets and state terror to protest a stolen election.

Less than two years later, Mohammad Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire to protest his continuous mistreatment by corrupt and abusive police and local authorities. His desperate and suicidal act sparked mass protests that spread across the region and shattered a seemingly entrenched political order. Popular uprisings in 2011 overthrew longstanding dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, Muammar Gaddafi's armed forces met protests with deadly force. When the Libyan dictator pledged to exterminate those rising against him, a civil war ensued. NATO intervened with cruise missiles and air strikes. Several countries, including Britain, France, and Qatar, covertly deployed special forces. Tripoli fell to the rebels in August 2011, and Gaddafi himself was captured and killed two months later, ending another longstanding dictatorship.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria responded to demonstrations against his rule with equally ruthless brutality. His regime killed thousands of protesters, rebel fighters, ordinary civilians, and army defectors who refused to gun down their fellow citizens. Pro-government militias ransacked villages, cutting the throats of children. Civil war soon raged. By July 2012 more than 17,000 were dead. But unlike in Libya, the West — as of this writing — has not intervened with military force against the Iran-backed regime in Damascus. Protesters were violently suppressed in Bahrain, too. Washington's criticism of its tiny but important ally in the Persian Gulf was conspicuously muted.

Yet in three Middle Eastern countries — Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, the political and cultural centre of the Arab world — democracy put down roots, even if other forces have tried to rip them out. It hasn't been an easy or complete transition. Libya was devastated by decades of Gaddafi's megalomaniacal rule and the war to end it. Democrats there are starting from scratch but have already accomplished much. In Egypt, the military resisted ceding control to a civilian government. Soldiers have been filmed shooting, beating, and stomping on unarmed civilians in Cairo's Tahrir Square, with evident relish. One woman had her top ripped open while being dragged along the ground, exposing her bra, while another soldier kicked her in the chest. Thousands of defiant women later filled the square in protest. They would not be intimidated. But the army kept clinging to power. In June 2012, the ruling military council dismissed Egypt's parliament and granted itself sweeping new controls, days before Mohamed Morsi was named the country's first democratically elected president. Egypt's revolution is unfinished.

A shift toward democracy in the Middle East has not swept to power the young liberal activists who filled television screens when the uprisings began. Mohamed Morsi was the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party, which also won a plurality of seats in Egypt's parliamentary elections — before the military annulled the results. And Islamists triumphed in Tunisia. But in Libya's first parliamentary elections in decades, held in July 2012, a coalition of secular parties dominated the vote.

There are those who interpret the relative success of Islamist parties in recent elections as proof that the Muslim countries of the Middle East and Central Asia will be either dictatorships or theocracies, and that Western liberals who cheered the overthrow of compliant strongmen in the region are dangerously naïve. But those who champion democracy cannot do so only when it produces results they like.

One can reasonably hope that newly-elected Islamists in the region will seek a system of governance closer to the Justice and Development Party in Turkey than Hamas in Gaza. They are appealing to many now, in part, because they have never governed and therefore don't have a reputation that has been tarnished by corruption and graft. This may change. Democracy is an uneven, messy business. Voters make mistakes and learn from them. The alternative — an unchallenged dictator — is far worse.

And while liberals in the Muslim world often lack the political organization of Islamists, they are resolute and not easily cowed. Anyone in the West who questions the commitment of people in the Middle East and Central Asia to supposedly Western values such as freedom of expression, democracy, or women's emancipation should compare what they have risked and suffered to enjoy those rights with what Iranian political prisoners, Egyptian protesters, Syrian and Libyan rebels, or educated Afghan women have done in an effort to achieve the same.

Democracy and governments that uphold the basic freedoms and human rights will eventually flourish in the Middle East and Central Asia. The West has a role, but it will be a supporting one. We can't remake the world in our image. But we can recognize that our truest friends in the region are those who share our values, and we can stand unapologetically and unflinchingly beside them. “Surely, we need the moral and spiritual support of all the world's forces for peace and freedom,” Akbar Ganji, the Iranian dissident and longtime political prisoner, wrote in a 2006 essay. “We have learned from our history that despotism can be imported, and that despotic rulers can survive with the help of outsiders. But we have also learned that we have to gain our freedom ourselves, and that only we can nourish that freedom and create a political system that can sustain it. Ours is a difficult struggle; it could even be a long one.”