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SV - I read that the people are actually nostalgic about the Taliban's time in Afghanistan.  AB - Some are, unfortunately. I have to say that I still talk to alot of people who say that the US and the West are different from the Soviets. Not everyone is saying this is an invasion, but so many more people are saying that “this is not what we were promised.” And “this is beginning to look like a failure.” And this is the word among educated people. But there's a big other group that's just saying, “you know, look around. I don't have a job, I can't feed my family, it's dangerous, you know, I don't care whether my daughter goes to school or not and if the Taliban came back it might be better.” There's so many people who don't have jobs or who are working as a driver or a guard or whatever for some foreign NGO, they see the discrepancies in their pay, they see the discrepancies in some ways in how they get treated, they see how the money goes to keeping the foreigners in secure places, with armored cars and you hear mumblings that maybe the Taliban was better. The other thing, I was on the radio last week with Qayum Karzai who is the brother of Hamid Karzai and who himself is a member of Parliament, and I thought he expressed this very well and I can't quote his exact words but basically he said, in 1996 the people chose the Taliban over the Jihadi warlords because the Jihadis had been so atrocious during the civil war period and if left with that choice, between the Taliban and the warlords they'll have to choose the Taliban. Not because they love the Taliban or what they stand for, but because the warlords are so much worse. For many people the only hope of any stability in the country is that NATO stays there. And people said to me that that they are terrified that if Taliban and other warlords thought that they could take Kabul for more than two days, they would be able to storm it and take it. It's just the presence of foreign troops that keeps them a little bit under control.
SV - How realistic is it to imagine an independent and secure Afghanistan in the near future? AB - I used to think it was realistic and now I don't know. You know I can't say I have decades of international experience to say, oh, this is just like wherever and here’s the scenario that will play out, but what I see when I'm there is so many people who want an independent and secure homelandbut just feel like their arms are tied behind their back and I spend my time speaking to lots of women activists, lots of fairly educated people so these are pretty rare people in this country, but also, speaking to the ordinary people that they help - I was in a shelter in Herat where women were living because they had to run away from home to save their lives, to escape forced marriage or had been so brutalized that someone had finally intervened and gotten them to shelter, which is lucky, because alot of women get arrested and put in jail still for leaving a violent situation. All of those people, what they want is plain and simple a better, safer, healthier life with opportunities for themselves and their families. There's no sort of average Joe on the streets who you can talk to who's saying, “oh yeah, I want to see these crooks and criminals and people with human rights violations in control of the country.” I don't believe in military solutions, but there really is an armed and dangerous element in that country right now, be it Taliban, there's lots of talk of foreign fighters being there, warlords and drug lords and that sort of thing and they could still be disarmed and kept from causing this kind of trouble. It's not like Iraq, because it's not an ideological battle of the people of a country against an invading force. It's a battle over resources and it's a battle over land and in some ways, it's a battle for security and economics. So if we'd actually done what we promised, which was to secure the country, to have free elections, to help them rebuild after thirty years of war so that there was an infrastructure, an economic infrastructure, there were jobs, that would be enough and the country would be able to run itself. There are educated people there, there's really good ideas of how to do it, it's not, despite everything we hear, it's not as splintered as the populace in Iraq seems to be. There's not the sectarian violence at the level of the populace, it’s at the warlord level as far as I can tell. SV - What should the responsibility of NATO in Afghanistan be right now? They've been saying that by building Afghan security forces they would be able to stabilize the country. Shouldn't they be focusing more on Afghanistan’s economy, infrastructure, education and healthcare? AB - Definitely. If alot of these guys had jobs and could feed themselves and their families, they would have no interest in the poppy crop, in the insurgency and any of those things. Alot of it is a response to what they see as the next failed state and the fact that these promises have not been kept. So, I think, even one of the NATO generals was saying was that the big failure here is the failure of hearts and minds. The reason the Taliban are able to get people riled up and get support is that they say, “well, you know, look around, is this better than when we were here? No.” People need to be able to eat, they need to be able to feel safe on the street, they need to be able to think about a future for their families that includes education and all those sorts of things. I’m reading some reports that the Afghan national army is growing and has been able to provide security. The police seem to be a different story. There are some contracts out there that are, not all of them, but there's some contracts that are giving pretty shoddy training for the police. The police are not getting paid on time, they're not getting paid enough, and so there are those who took off their uniforms to go join the riots because that meets their needs more than being in uniform and trying to stop it. Not all of them did, but there were enough reports of that happening. The last estimate I saw was that if you compare military expenditure versus development expenditure the differential is 900%. And by some estimates, the same article said that ten times as much money is spent on security as development by the actually development agencies. There are reports that people are starving in Khandahar that humanitarian aid is not reaching the people in need.
SH- Thank you Dr. Brodsky for your time. It should be added that the reports out of Afghanistan over the past week are just another indication of how serious the problems are. There were four suicide bombing, including one today, bringing the total for the year to 92 versus 11 such attacks in all of the year 2005. There was the cold blooded killing of a well respected, middle aged, Afghan woman government official as she left for work in Kandahar. When Karzai and Musharraf had dinner at the White House last week they had already spent the week blaming each other for Afghanistan’s problems and couldn’t even muster a public handshake, and through all of this Bush continues to promote the tired rhetoric that we are making progress. The people of Afghanistan deserve better and even if the US only cares about its own self-interest, it’s hard to understand how the failure that have been allowed to occur in Afghanistan help the US in the least. If we are to truly believe that the peace, liberty and democracy the US means to spread is exemplified by life in Afghanistan it’s either a disgraceful statement about what US values really mean, or its got to be called a dismal failure and we all need to step up to the plate to make good on the promises of a better life that were prominsed Afghanistan and that every people in the world deserves. Recommend this article...
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