Amidst the cacophony of deeply insincere Sept. 11 “remembrances” on television, one truly important development in America’s War on Terror is being overlooked. In southern Afghanistan, the Taliban has seized upon a legacy of broken promises and failed reconstruction to return to power.
Afghanistan’s security situation today is at its worst since 2001; in the past two weeks alone, 26 NATO soldiers have lost their lives fighting a resurgent Taliban movement that now controls half the nation. Last Friday’s suicide car bomb attack in the capital, Kabul, killed two American soldiers and bloodily announced the return of the Taliban to the heart of Afghanistan. The lawlessness, corruption and violence that permeate Afghanistan today – where President Hamid Karzai barely controls Kabul, let alone the restive south – echoes the anarchy of the early 1990s that originally led to the emergence of the fundamentalist Islamic militia. After Sept. 11, the international community claimed to understand that failed states such as Afghanistan provided fertile soil for the emergence of radical, anti-democratic movements such as the Taliban. Western nations promised to never let conditions in Afghanistan become that bad again. They lied.
Five years ago, in the wake of the lightning American victory of special forces and air power that drove the Taliban from power, the West was quick to promise lavish reconstruction aid. Declaring “We know that true peace will only be achieved when we give the Afghan people the means to achieve their own aspirations,” President George W. Bush led the international community in pledging $13.4 billion for Afghanistan’s reconstruction at the Tokyo and Berlin conferences. Never mind that Afghanistan’s reconstruction minister, Mohammad Amin Farhang, originally estimated that “the cost of reconstructing Afghanistan [will be] $15 billion.” But Afghanistan’s reconstruction has fallen short of even these modest goals: According to the World Bank, only $7.3 billion has actually been spent on reconstruction. In contrast, America and NATO have spent $82.5 billion on military operations in Afghanistan since 2002 – more than ten times the total spent on development.
The failure of reconstruction has fueled the growth of Afghanistan’s only export, narcotics. In 2001, Afghanistan had 29 square miles of opium poppies under cultivation; this year, 637 square miles are under cultivation, set to produce a record 6,100 tons of opium. Afghanistan grows “a staggering 92 percent of total world supply” of opium, according to Antonio Maria Costa, global executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Much of the opium production is under the direct control of the Taliban, which uses the drug money to bankroll its operations in a convergence of organized crime and terrorism. NATO forces in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban are in an unenviable situation: Either they can turn a blind eye to the opium production and let the Taliban profit or they can destroy the opium fields, depriving Afghan villagers of what little income they make – pushing those villagers into the arms of the Taliban.
The 800-pound gorilla in the room during any analysis of Afghanistan, of course, is whether President Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq diverted Western attention away during the crucial period between the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and its reemergence last year. According to Western diplomats in Kabul, “U.S. and international attention veered from Afghanistan in mid-2002, and focused on Iraq – There was a feeling they had got rid of the Taliban, and left [Karzai], and that things would settle down.” The events of the past four years have demonstrated that optimism to be naïve.
Now, the international community must decide whether it has the political will to actually deliver the promised reconstruction aid to Afghanistan. Building an economically viable Afghan state is the first step toward ending the narcotics trade, isolating the Taliban and saving both Afghan and American lives.
Cyrus Hadadi is a senior electrical engineering, mathematics and history major. He can be reached at chadadi@yahoo.com.
