Enforcing Insecurity in Afghanistan

The following is an excerpt from "Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence" (Seven Stories, 2006) by Sonali Kolhatkar and James Ingalls.

Once touted as a success in the "War on Terror," Afghanistan has now deteriorated into increasing violence with the return of warlords, a flourishing drug trade, and ongoing women's oppression. Additionally, us/NATO bombing raids still claim civilian lives and their brutal "hunt and kill" tactics have ironically resulted in a resurgence of the Taliban. Despite the NATO takeover of "security operations" this summer, Western troops in Afghanistan are more unpopular than ever and per soldier are just as likely to be killed as in Iraq.

But this descent into violence is a predictable outcome of deliberate U.S. policies over the past five years. As we explain in our new book, Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories), the U.S. refused to allow UN peacekeeping troops to stabilize Afghanistan outside Kabul, and instead allowed their old allies, the Northern Alliance and other warlords, to regain power and resume their oppression.

This, in combination with U.S. military policy, has actually increased insecurity and made the Taliban once more a palatable alternative for many Afghans. However, despite the resurgence of the Taliban, "many Afghans [still] cite regional warlords as the greatest source of insecurity (Human Rights Watch)."

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The following is an excerpt from Bleeding Afghanistan, Chapter 3: Replacing One Brutal Regime With Another

The U.S. ensured that its warlord partners were spared the glare of international oversight by working to restrict international peacekeepers to Kabul for more than two years after the fall of the Taliban. This had the effect of entrenching warlords in rural Afghanistan, where the overwhelming majority of Afghans reside. The New York Times,

As warlords have carved out chunks of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, the lawlessness that gave rise to the strict Islamic movement in the mid-1990's has begun to spread, once again, across this country. The United States-led military campaign... has returned to power nearly all of the same warlords who had misruled the country in the days before the Taliban.

As a result of the November 2001 Bonn Conference, the United Nations established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in December 2001 to "assist the newly established Afghan Transitional Authority create a secure environment in and around Kabul and support the reconstruction of Afghanistan." At first, "the Northern Alliance and the Bush administration balked" at the idea of peacekeepers: the Alliance because they wanted to be the only armed force in the country; the U.S. because Washington hated working with international troops it could not control. Yunus Qanooni, the Northern Alliance representative at Bonn, said, "We prefer that security is looked after by Afghan forces themselves ... there is [already] complete security in Kabul." In the end it was decided that the ISAF would consist of about 5,000 troops from nineteen countries led by Britain, and would report to U.S. General Tommy Franks.

But their mandate would be limited: the troops would be confined to Kabul, already the most secure part of the country. While ISAF forces would be restricted to the capital, U.S. forces would engage in a hunt for al-Qa'eda and bin Laden in the provinces. The ISAF was "noteworthy for what it will not do," that is, keep the peace outside of the capital, "where many Afghans live in a lawless no-man's-land largely cut off from international aid." Compared with other postconflict environments, the international troop contingent in Afghanistan is pathetically small. For example, Bosnia, which is 13 percent of Afghanistan by population (and eight percent of Afghanistan by area), has 18,000 NATO peacekeepers. To achieve the same ratio of forces to population as in Bosnia, Afghanistan would require about 134,000 troops.