THE news from Afghanistan appears anything but encouraging: Taleban forces have managed to carry out a suicide attack at the gates of Bagram airbase while US Vice President Dick Cheney was there, a major Taleban spring offensive is expected, disarmament efforts are all but stalled and the UK feels constrained to send 1,400 extra troops to confront the situation but far less than NATO says is necessary. The overall image created is that Afghanistan is slipping back into civil war and that NATO forces are unable or, worse, unwilling to prevent the Taleban and Al-Qaeda from rebuilding their strength.
But that is not exactly the real picture. That little word “appears” in the opening sentence is all-important. It is inevitable that in Afghanistan, as elsewhere, that bad news rather than good news makes the headlines — an attack on Bagram airbase rather than the 4.8 million Afghan refugees who have returned from Pakistan and Iran since 2002; the attempt by some Italian political parties to force a withdrawal of Italy’s 1,900 troops instead of the billions in aid for reconstruction. Did anyone, for example, hear about Canada’s pledge last week to up its Afghan aid program to over $1 billion? Almost certainly not.
Because bad news is all the more startling, it will be the same today. It will be the stories of yesterday’s roadside bomb which killed three civilians that the world hears reads about, or the interview with the Taleban’s top military commander warning that he has a suicide army waiting to take on the NATO forces in spring that people see on television. These stories should be given prominence. But that does not mean that Afghanistan is all doom and gloom. All the evidence is to the contrary. Romano Prodi, reconfirmed by Parliament as Italy’s prime minister, has pledged that Italian troops will stay; Australia and Denmark are looking to follow the UK move and increasing their contingents in order to contain any rise in violence.
It is a very different picture to the one in Iraq, all the more so because the Taleban do not have a significant support base or the means to launch attacks on the levels of the Iraqi insurgents. All the indications are that the Afghans — all the Afghans, Pashtuns included — do not want them back. What they saw of them they do not like. They do not like foreign troops in their country either; but if those troops can bring peace and propensity, most are willing to tolerate them for the short term. But things could still go badly wrong in a country where people put tribal loyalties way ahead of national ones. Indiscriminate air attacks on their villages have raised Pashtun resentment of NATO forces. It would be folly to so push them into the Taleban’s embrace.
Meanwhile, one vital question needs answering: If the Taleban knew about Cheney’s visit to Bagram as they claim, and the attack was not coincidental, who told them? Do they have moles in the inner sanctums of Karzai’s entourage? That is something NATO forces will want to know.
