Will America remember Afghans this time?

By Alan Brody

From 1993-95, I was UNICEF's officer in charge of planning humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan during some of that country's darkest times. In those days, we could get little help from the American government for the Afghans.

America befriended them in the 1980s for strategic reasons, providing arms and training to mujahedeen “freedom fighters.” That was our term for them, when they fought a Soviet army and a communist government in Kabul. American media gloated when brother-Muslims like Osama bin Laden came from around the world as Afghans' allies in those battles.

Soviet troops left in 1989, and after the communist government finally fell in 1992, America closed up shop. We left behind seven armed and feuding mujahedeen factions, whose leaders' titles our media suddenly transformed from freedom fighter to warlord.

By 1994, Pakistan's ISI secret service, an organization greatly expanded and trained with CIA support in the 1980s, became frustrated with the warlords who refused to cooperate in opening up trade routes with the newly independent Central Asian countries. In 1994, ISI empowered a new group, the Taliban, as an instrument of its strategic purposes. With Pakistani arms and support, the Taliban between 1994 and 1996 took power across almost 90 percent of Afghanistan, and imposed a medieval style of authority.

America took a hands-off approach until the Twin Towers fell. Then, within three months, the CIA toppled the Taliban using the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, a grouping of those formerly squabbling freedom fighter/warlords our CIA had cultivated two decades before.

In 2002, our diplomats scoured the world to find an appropriate Afghan to install as new leader. They found Hamid Karzai, he whom our diplomats now complain about as if it weren't we who plucked him from obscurity and installed him as president.

From 2002-08, America poured money into Afghanistan, but almost none of it reached the ground level and the average Afghan. We like to blame failures on corruption among warlords in the Afghan government, and on the insecure conditions created by a resurgent Taliban. Nobody talks about how many of those billions the American government spent came right back home, into the bank accounts of American contractors who descended on Kabul.

My cynicism notwithstanding, I'm not for America's abandoning Afghanistan again. Beyond self-interest, I believe we owe a moral debt to fundamentally decent people of Afghanistan, who have a history of intense suffering dating from Ronald Reagan's time to the present.

American plans to empower an Afghan national army and national police force will not return average Afghans to the status quo ante, however. Such national institutions of enforcement are bound to succumb to corruption. Afghans, together with the Pashtun tribal peoples across the border in Pakistan, have a 5,000-year history of powerful resistance to such abuses.

In the 1980s, America was on the side of those opposing centralized abuses of power. The rapid successes to bring down the Taliban in 2001 also arose from our partnering against centralized abuse of power by the Taliban. In the last few years, however, it is the Taliban who have cast themselves on the side of those opposing centralized corruption, abuses of power and foreign military domination.

Partnering with local elders to arm and empower them against any and all external impositions (Taliban, al-Qaida, or Western) seems to me America's best hope. That partnership could support local militias controlled by elders grouped together in regional councils (shouras). We also need to provide those elders with money to hire their youth to rebuild villages, schools, clinics, irrigation systems, roads and mosques.

Those elders may in time turn arms against American soldiers, but only if they perceive we and our allies seek to conquer and control them. Do we? I hope not. Can we? Looking at history, I think not.

Alan Brody is on the boards of the Iowa United Nations Association and the Iowa City Foreign Relations Committee. His longer essay on the politics of 1993-95 Afghanistan can be found by Googling “Brody Virginia Quarterly Review.”