MOSCOW. (Yekaterina Kuznetsova for RIA Novosti) - Last month the world marked the fifth anniversary of terrorist attacks on the United States. The war on terror began several months later with an operation against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The state of affairs in that country could be used as a yardstick to assess the degree of success in this new global conflict, but in that case any triumphant declarations have to be abandoned.
In numerical terms the war against terror in Afghanistan gives hope for victory: today, NATO has 30,000 men deployed in the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) operation, with more than 1,400 of them from the Netherlands; by the end of the year 8.4 billion dollars will have been invested, with more than 10 billion dollars committed for 2006-2007. But there are other figures that the West does not like remembering: during the operation in Afghanistan 517 servicemen of the coalition's troops have died; the acreage sown to poppy increased from 80,000 ha to 131,000 ha in 2002-2004, and the value of opium exported from the country topped 52% of its GDP.
The successes scored by the coalition in democratization and the building of the state look dismal. Last spring the Taliban went on the offensive. Rumors of its demise proved premature. Over the past year the Taliban managed to restore a dense network of allies in the country's south, establishing contact with Pashto, Uzbek and Tajik field commanders, the Hizb-i-Islam group of mujahideen and representatives of authorities in Kabul. Their change of strategy - giving up the fight against the Pakistani army and taking up the fight against the Americans and their allies - forced the coalition forces to limit their operations to large cities.
The worsening of the situation in Afghanistan is raising doubts about the adequacy of the coalition's objectives, the wisdom of the counterterrorism strategy and, lastly, the proximity of victory over the world's largest terrorist seat.
Afghan "democracy" today is propped up by the coalition's bayonets. The Australian general Angus Houston was right when he said that Afghanistan would need foreign military support for another 10 years. At the same time, it is highly probable that the foreign presence will have to be boosted for two reasons: first, the Taliban are successfully recruiting new fighters into their ranks, posing as the center of all but legitimate resistance against foreign invaders, something fraught with an expansion of the conflict area; and, second, to achieve at least a degree of stability, if not democracy, in Afghanistan, the Americans and their allies must assume responsibility for the functioning of new-born state institutions and civil society bodies. Despite the convening of the Loya Jirga in 2002, the adoption of a constitution and presidential election in 2004, Afghanistan cannot function on its own as a state. It can exist only when "manually controlled", which calls for considerable resources, both human and financial.
The challenges facing the Westerners are all the more difficult because Afghanistan is not just a non-state, it is a failed state, concentrating in it all the vices and defects of "no man's land". The basic problem of the Afghan government - and at the same time the hallmark of all failed states -is the state's inability to control its own borders, notably the border with the Pakistani provinces of Southern and Northern Waziristan, teeming with Taliban training bases and camps. The ability of the Americans and Europeans to cut short Pakistan's creeping intervention is crucial to the outcome of a psychological attack mounted against the Afghans' combative mentality. For close on thirty years the Afghans have been living in war conditions, and for many this state has become not only a way of obtaining bread, but also a way of life. Peace culture is something totally unknown to most of them.
A further complication is that the West has opted (perhaps yielding to the pressure of its favorites) for building a unitary state in Afghanistan with strong central authority and a vertical bureaucratic structure. Article one of Afghanistan's new constitution says that "Afghanistan is an independent, unitary and indivisible Islamic republic" (my italics). But while full control is necessary in military matters, in political issues it is useless and even harmful. Afghanistan's historical and ethnographic development predisposes it to a confederative organization with strong regional leaders who are tribal chiefs, and with limited central authority, as represented by its current president Hamid Karzai. Since the moment it emerged as a state at the end of the 18th century, Afghanistan has been a totality of micro-communities with differing - tribal, ethnic, linguistic or religious - dominant features. These micro-communities need a certain measure of autonomy, but unless they are consolidated into larger regional minorities the country is doomed to fragmentation.
On the other hand, until Karzai gains a monopoly on violence or at least assumes control over government finances (which will happen when all illegal armed formations are disarmed and opium trade stopped), all attempts "to put a state mechanism in place" or "rehabilitate the judicial infrastructure" by 2010 (the aims formulated in the agreement on Afghanistan adopted at the London conference on Afghanistan early this year) will be in vain.
The war on terror can be won, but the way to victory will be long and thorny. It is as complex to turn Afghanistan into a civilized country as to reorganize and Europeanize some distant possessions of Old World empires. It will require patience, funds, and readiness to bear losses. (Why the donor countries need this can be left for politicians to discuss.) The policy followed today by coalition forces in Afghanistan is determined by the American military, which is known to lack the experience of running foreign territories for at least the lifetime of one generation and is unable to put together even a medium-term state building strategy. And it should be borne in mind that with lack of early results - democracy cannot survive in a legal vacuum, with the threat of a foreign invasion- the situation in Afghanistan might be "mothballed". In this case, Washington's NATO allies in Europe will have to act as extras in America's ambitious but disastrous project known as the "war on terror in Afghanistan".
Yekaterina Kuznetsova, Post-Industrial Society Studies Center.
