What a farce! Can it get any better than this? Hamid Karzai appears to be inching toward victory in yet another “democratic election” that looks like like going on forever.
In the latest update, Afghan election Commission has put Karzai’s vote share at 56 percent. Which seems to have come as a bit of a shock to the Coalition of the Willing. They had been hoping to dump Karzai and move on with another “moderate and democratic leader”, Abdullah Abdullah. The West’s disappointment over Abdullah’s flop show despite all the help he got from friends in high places is almost comical. And Abdullah has turned on his former boss and ally to accuse him of stealing the election. Abdullah should know. After all, he was part of the same clique not long ago. Ironically, for all this talk of stealing the election, this may have been the closest Karzai has come to a real election. Confronted with the looming possibility of the wily Tajik, Abdullah, replacing Karzai, the Pashtun majority apparently rallied behind the president.
Karzai had never been a favorite option but pitted against Abdullah, he clearly looked attractive to his fellow-Pashtuns. However, America and its ever-obliging allies seem to have lost all interest in the president of Kabul. By repeatedly protesting — however mild and ineffective in nature — against the coalition’s murderous attacks targeting innocent civilians and suggesting talks with the Taleban, Karzai has raised the coalition’s hackles. Besides, in their view, he has served his purpose and is already beyond his sell-by date.
Apparently, Afghanistan needs another “leader” dancing to the tunes of Washington and London. Karzai has become too independent and assertive for their liking. Not that I have any sympathy for Karzai. In fact, between him and Abdullah, the poor Afghans have as much a choice as between the devil and the deep blue sea. They are doomed either way.
When will the coalition muster the courage to face the reality in Afghanistan? This is a doomed war and a doomed mission to make a Japan out of Afghanistan, a haven of Western democracy.
Nothing they do will ever succeed in Afghanistan. Because the problem is not with ineffectual angels like Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah or with Afghan people. The problem lies with the coalition itself. However, desperately you try and bend over backward to justify this whole charade, this is still an unjust war and invasion! This is still the occupation, stupid! No election under occupation — however free, fair and all that jazz — can be considered democratic. Tyranny is in the very nature of occupation.
I am all for democracy and share Churchill’s belief that, despite all its flaws, this remains the best form of governance discovered so far. And I don’t believe in the bunkum either that democracy is ill suited for the Muslim world. But if you call what Afghanistan is being subjected to right now democracy, then I must be Albert Einstein. How can a people, enslaved and in chains, exercise their democratic right freely under the shadow of the gun? As someone said, democracy is a fragile seed: If you want it to take root, don’t plant it in a hurricane.
How can you expect a people to vote with their hearts and minds when they are dying in hundreds each week in airstrikes and bombings? Airstrike after deadly airstrike — attacks that spare no one, not even weddings and funerals and leave nothing but the rancid smell of cordite in the air. Last week, after a coalition strike in Kunduz killed nearly a hundred people, US Commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal went on Afghan TV to placate the angry Afghans and promise a probe into the “incident”. I wonder whatever happened to all those probes and inquiries ordered in the past into similar, “regrettable incidents”. Has anyone been taken to task for such attacks in the past? One hasn’t heard of even the mildest of routine, disciplinary action against the trigger-happy liberators of Afghanistan.
No wonder they go on shooting and bombing down the people they came to liberate and democratize! Pardon me for interrupting Barack Obama’s reverie, but democracy and occupation do not go together. Although I still remain a huge fan and believer in this US president’s potential to change America, and the world, for the better, I do not think he’s got it right in Afghanistan. Which is rather strange for someone who has vehemently opposed the war in Iraq, the other grievous blunder of his predecessor, right from the word go.
For the war on Afghanistan is as unfair and unjust as the one next door in Iraq. OK, it might not have been preceded by the monumental lies and deception, as had been the case with Iraq. With the US hopping mad and demanding blood after the 9/11 catastrophe, the rest of the world nodded in sympathy and unquestioning acquiescence when it decided to bomb Afghanistan back to where it belonged, the Stone Age. No one had the courage to turn around and ask what right the US had to invade Afghanistan and lodge its handpicked men by driving out an existing, functioning government.
Even the United Nations, that handmaiden of big powers, went along by putting its seal of approval on the invasion. But eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks and the invasion, is it not time to ask what the coalition has achieved in Afghanistan? More important, it is now more than ever important for America and its allies to ask themselves what is it that they want in Afghanistan. What are the goal posts, if I may ask?
If it was a war against Al-Qaeda, as we were once assured, then it is not there in Afghanistan anymore. It is the Taleban and ordinary Afghans that the coalition is fighting now. And if is this war is against Afghans and their country, then let me assure President Obama that the US has a long and endless war on its hands. I know we have been here before. But if history is any indication, the coalition could fight the Afghans a thousand years and yet return empty-handed — and utterly defeated
As James Fergusson, the author of “A Million Bullets: The Real Story of the British Army in Afghanistan”, wrote in The Independent last week, quoting a Taleban commander, ordinary Afghans hate war but they see the current struggle as “a just jihad against foreign aggressors.” And when they see it as jihad and their moral obligation to fight the occupation, they will never give up their fight. “One year, a hundred years, a million years — it doesn’t matter!” How can you fight and win against such an enemy? I hate to bat for the Taleban. But talking to the resistance may be the only way forward for the coalition, if they want to leave Afghanistan with their dignity intact. There’s another option: Just get the hell out of Afghanistan and let Afghans sort out their mess themselves. This is what the British and Russians did. This is what Americans will eventually have to do.
— Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Dubai-based commentator and can be reached at [email protected]
