In the first of a five-part series from Afghanistan, MARY FITZGERALD, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, reports from Kabul, a barricaded city living under threat of the Taliban
IT IS NOT easy to meet the woman often described as Afghanistan’s bravest. Malalai Joya, one of the country’s youngest MPs, lives in hiding after surviving four assassination attempts. Surrounded by an ever-present phalanx of bodyguards, she moves between safe houses dressed in the blue burka she refers to as “a shroud for the living”, and never spends more than one night in the same location.
Arranging an interview with Joya involves umpteen phone calls before we pull up beside a car driven by the man who will direct us to our assigned meeting place in a Kabul suburb. Past a heavy steel gate, there are guards with AK-47s and a woman who searches our bags. Inside, Joya, a diminutive figure with sad eyes and a soft voice, sits on a cushion-strewn floor with a sheaf of papers detailing human-rights abuses.
Joya was only four days old when Soviet tanks first rolled into Afghanistan in 1979. Her life in many respects captures the multiple tragedies that have befallen her country in the three decades since. Born in Farah, the southern province where US air strikes killed scores of civilians earlier this month, she grew up as a refugee in Iran and Pakistan before returning to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to teach women in secret. But the delight Joya felt following the ousting of the Taliban regime in 2001 soon faded when she realised history was about to repeat itself as Afghanistan’s warlords regained their footing in the new political order.
The death threats began the day Joya stood up at one of the first sittings of the newly established national assembly to rail against the presence of warlords, criminals and drug traffickers, the very people, she charged, who had brought Afghanistan to its knees.
The room rang with shouts of “whore”, “infidel” and “communist” as Joya was bundled out. Little has changed since for what she calls “the suffering and the voiceless” people of Afghanistan, Joya says, her voice rising with barely suppressed rage. “As long as these corrupt warlords and criminals are in power, and on the other side international troops are killing our civilians, it is difficult to see hope and change in the lives of the people of my country.”
It is a sentiment shared by many of Joya’s fellow Afghans, left disillusioned by broken promises of security and reconstruction as the world turned its attention elsewhere after 2001. Optimism is in short supply these days as the country girds itself for what is expected to be a critical year.
In August, Afghans will go to the polls in the second presidential election held since the Taliban government was deposed. Meanwhile, US president Barack Obama has decided to make Afghanistan his war, ordering the deployment of more than 17,000 additional American troops in an attempt to break the stalemate between a resurgent Taliban and the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in the country’s hardscrabble southern provinces, stepping up diplomatic engagement, and promising more aid.
No one doubts that the challenges that lie ahead are formidable. “There were so many promises and none of them were kept. People have lost their optimism and are not ready to trust so easily again,” says Mohammad Afzal Ahmadzai, a member of the Afghan senate who recently visited Ireland as part of a parliamentary delegation organised by the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in Wicklow. “People see little or no economic development but the biggest challenge by far is security.”
Vast swathes of the country, particularly to the south and east, feel under siege, the population caught between an increasingly assertive Taliban and the presence of international troops. The Taliban boast that they control more than half the countryside: patrolling roads; running their own courts; and levying taxes, including a cut on profits from opium fields, allowing them to pocket huge sums to power the insurgency.
The number of violent incidents in Afghanistan shot up from less than 50 per month in 2003 to almost 600 last year. More than 4,500 people were killed in 2008, some 2,200 of them civilians, a record high according to the UN. Though Isaf commanders complain about the gap between perception and reality, insisting the security situation is not deteriorating any further, Afghans and civilian foreigners tell a different story. Aid workers, in particular, complain of an ever-expanding list of no-go areas, with many of the most desperate corners of the country now out of bounds.
For people such as Farghana, a twentysomething shop assistant at Bagh-e-Zanana, a women-only park and bazaar that opened five years ago in Kabul, the security situation is intolerable, keeping families apart. “My father works as a doctor in Zabul in the south but it is too dangerous to travel there so we hardly ever see him and we always worry for his safety,” she says, sitting among shelves piled high with cosmetics, lingerie and slimming aids. “I’m not sure security is going to improve soon.”
Afghan president Hamid Karzai has long been ridiculed as the “mayor of Kabul” by those who complain his authority does not stretch far beyond the capital but Kabulis now talk worriedly of a city encircled by the Taliban and increasingly cut off from the rest of the country, with only one of four highways leading out of it – the road north – deemed relatively safe. This is a city that feels more and more like a citadel of barricaded, sandbagged streets, high-walled compounds bristling with coils of barbed wire and wary soldiers with rifles swinging from their shoulders; a city left jittery following a number of high-profile suicide bombing and gun attacks in the last 12 months that showed the insurgents’ ability to strike right at its very heart.
Security aside, there are a multitude of reasons why Afghans say they have been failed by their own government and the international community. Almost eight years after the fall of the Taliban, theirs remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with abysmal rates of illiteracy, infant mortality and malnutrition. More than 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s 25 million inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day and life expectancy is a mere 45 years. Most Afghans live in homes without light, heat and running water.
But it is the pockets of eye-popping wealth amid such chronic poverty that throw the country’s problems into sharp relief. The contrasts are no more obvious than in Kabul. Here the majority – people such as Mubarak Shah, who has lived with his family in a derelict cinema since losing a leg fighting the Soviets in the 1980s – struggle to put food in their mouths. Meanwhile in the city’s more affluent enclaves, gaudy mansions, often referred to as “poppy palaces” by locals who mutter about the source of the owners’ income, rise incongruously out of a rubbled landscape that still bears the scars of three decades of war.
At the country’s first shopping mall, the gleaming and heavily guarded Kabul City Centre, there are six floors filled with boutiques, jewellers and electronics stores selling merchandise far beyond the reach of all but a tiny elite. Outside, burka-clad women balance toddlers with kohl-lined eyes on one arm as they tap the mirrored windows of the SUVs that clog Kabul’s dusty thoroughfares, begging for a few coins. The main arteries of the city are well-paved, thanks to reconstruction funds, but turn off into the side streets and you find rutted roads, gaping potholes and open sewers that flood when the rains come.
“There is an increasing gap between the rich and poor,” says Fiona McLysaght, Concern’s country director for Afghanistan. “I think most people blame the Afghan government . . . [they] are very disillusioned with the central government, but blame is also apportioned to the international community.”
THE KARZAIgovernment's failure to transform colossal aid sums into jobs or economic opportunities for ordinary Afghans has fuelled the discontent, as has the widespread perception that the problems of endemic corruption and nepotism lead all the way to the presidential palace. Tales abound of aid funds being siphoned off by officials and there are long-standing rumours that one of Karzai's relatives is involved in the opium trade.
“The entire economy has become criminalised,” as Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official and Afghan finance minister who is expected to be one of Karzai’s strongest challengers in the August election, put it earlier this year. “Even the street vendors know that the government is corrupt and dysfunctional,” says Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan’s Centre for Research and Policy Studies.
The frustration and desperation felt by ordinary Afghans sometimes prompts, if not quite nostalgia for the Taliban era, then comparisons between then and now. The country felt safer, people say, and though Taliban rule was harsh, many argue that at least it was honest.
Although research shows the Taliban remains unpopular with the majority of the population – its support base is almost exclusively limited to the Pashtun-dominated south – there are concerns that insurgents could tap into the disillusionment that has grown out of dashed hopes and resentment over official graft and the rising civilian death toll caused by Nato airstrikes. “People have had enough. If this situation continues any longer, the danger is that you will see more people, men and women, say ‘we are Taliban too’,” warns one veteran women’s activist.
A report published in March by the International Crisis Group played down such fears. “While it has made military gains, the Taliban today enjoys little support among an Afghan public tired of war,” it said. “Disillusionment with both the international community and the state has grown but the vast majority of people remain far more fearful of what would happen if foreign troops were to leave rather than stay.”
Haroun Mir agrees. “The Afghan people know well that the only alternative to the presence of foreign troops is a return of the Taliban and their foreign associates. They don’t want to live under the rule of a dark force such as the Taliban.
“People are ready to accept more sacrifices if they are persuaded that it will result in a better future. But they are angry to see the outcome of their sacrifices pocketed by a few corrupt officials while they remain poor. The major reason behind people’s frustration is this dysfunctional and corrupt government, which has wasted a lot of resources for the personal enrichment of a few and to the detriment of the bulk of the population.”
Meanwhile, the insurgency continues, with the Taliban last month announcing a renewed offensive against government targets and international forces. Isaf commanders and Afghan officials are concerned about the impact of recent developments in neighbouring Pakistan, where the army was forced to move against the country’s indigenous Taliban, grown emboldened by a peace agreement that earlier this year allowed them to impose Sharia law in northwestern districts. This week, militants carried out simultaneous suicide bombings in the city of Khost, close to the border with Pakistan, killing and injuring more than two dozen people.
The insurgency in Afghanistan is a complex and fluid one that, contrary to popular perception internationally, is not simply a Taliban fight. Nor is it a movement wholly based and directed from outside the country, as the Karzai government often claims.
Nato officials talk of a number of parallel insurgencies. Violence is stemming from many sources including militants loyal to veteran warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda-linked fighters from the so-called Haqqani network operating out of Waziristan, a tribal area across the border in Pakistan, and disgruntled former commanders from the jihad against the Soviets who receive allowances when they sign up with old comrades now involved in the insurgency.
Last year the outgoing commander of British troops in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, stated unequivocally that a military victory over the Taliban was “neither feasible nor supportable” – echoing what many officials and diplomats have been saying for some time. “We’re not going to win this war,” Carleton-Smith said. “It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army. We may well leave with there still being a low but steady ebb of rural insurgency.”
As this assessment gains traction, there is growing support for what would once have been considered unthinkable – the possibility of negotiating a settlement with the Taliban that may involve giving them a measure of political power. Tentative talks have already taken place between the Karzai government and Taliban intermediaries but the entire process remains wrapped in secrecy. Those responsible for coordinating a separate project, the government’s national-reconciliation programme, say they have succeeded in coaxing thousands of Taliban fighters to give up their guns and leave the insurgency.
Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil, who served as the Taliban foreign minister when the movement ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, supports the notion that a process of engagement is the only way forward. “In Pashtu we have a saying that fire cannot be fought with fire,” he told me in his heavily guarded home in Kabul. “The solution to the current conflict can only be through negotiation.”
This series was supported with a grant from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund run by Irish Aid
INSIDE AFGHANISTAN
- MONDAY
What now for Afghan women? - TUESDAY
Tackling the insurgency - WEDNESDAY
Afghanistan's opium scourge - THURSDAY
The Irish troops in Afghanistan