A Dangerous Backslide
Age-old problems-and a new Taliban surge-are dragging the Afghans down
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN-If Iraq has been the self-destructive problem child of American intervention, Afghanistan seemed to be the model sibling. Ostensibly less demanding, it was, as far as most could tell, on its way to one day assuming a solid position in the world community.
But five years after U.S. troops swept away the Taliban and brought promises of a better life, Afghanistan's future is, at best, touch and go: Suicide bombers are striking in the capital, while once routed Taliban fighters have regrouped to take on NATO troops-mostly British and Canadian soldiers-in the Pashtun "tribal belt" villages. Throughout the country, corruption is rampant, courts are nonexistent, and infrastructure remains abysmal in a nation where the average life expectancy is just 43 years.
President Hamid Karzai, whose 2004 election provided an electric moment (in a nation in which less than 10 percent of the population has access to electricity), is now widely seen as failing to confront issues of corruption and insecurity. The most prominent economic success, unfortunately, is opium production, which is at record highs this year and provides a cash windfall for insurgents and criminal gangs. On the drug front, says NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, U.S. Gen. James Jones, "we're losing ground."
The Taliban resurgence forced the Bush administration to shelve summer plans to bring home some 3,000 of the 20,000 American troops here. Last week, NATO expanded its security responsibility throughout Afghanistan to 32,000 soldiers, taking command of 12,000 U.S. troops in the eastern part of the country. (Others are assigned to anti-terrorism missions, including hunting Osama bin Laden.)
What has gone wrong? At a minimum, it is clear that Afghanistan is a land of missed opportunities. Shockingly poor-poorer than all but a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa-Afghanistan drew foreign aid for new roads, clinics, government buildings, and schools, including those that for the first time provide education for more than 1.5 million girls. But analysts are in widespread agreement that the United States was slow and ambivalent about taking on nation building. "The U.S. position after we went into Afghanistan was, 'We don't do nation building. We don't do roads. We don't do peacekeeping,'" says Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University's Center on International Cooperation. "That meant we didn't do anything to provide security for Afghans-and people noticed that."
With all the heralding of democracy, Afghans were impatient to see meaningful improvement in their daily lives. One of the more popular Pashtun proverbs makes just that point: "Don't show me the palm trees; show me the dates." Aid from the United States and elsewhere has ramped up, but the benefits lag behind expectations-and the security situation deteriorates. Although the 30,000-strong Afghan Army gets good reviews from U.S. military officials, it remains underequipped.
And while there is a growing recognition that force alone won't stop the violence-today the mantra of Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the top U.S. commander in the country, is "Where the road ends, the Taliban begins"-there remains the stark reality that the land has long been, to put it mildly, a governing challenge. In a country 33 percent larger than Iraq and 15 percent more populous, people living in large swaths of territory remain alienated and vulnerable to Taliban control. "We don't have any major water project, any major power project, and we just recently started to build rural access roads in some areas," says Rubin.
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