Trouble Ahead

8 December 2004


Hamid Karzai Inaugurated as Afghan President

Some jobs aren’t worth having, doomed to failure from the beginning. President of Afghanistan isn’t quite in that category, but it is awfully close. Hamid Karzai, chosen by the occupation forces and then duly chosen in a badly flawed yet accepted election by the people, has a tough term ahead. Against him are geography, history, economic and cultural factors. Quite what he has in his favor is far less tangible.

First of all, Afghanistan is sort of a country, but really, it is a geographical concept. It’s a mountainous region where every valley is, in effect, a different political zone. Switzerland has managed to be quite a successful little country in a very similar landscape. Afghanistan, though, exists really because neither Tsarist Russia nor the British Raj in India managed to win over the locals. At the same time, the two needed a cohesive entity – multiple regions with independence would create even bigger headaches in St. Petersburg and London. Since the death of both the Tsar and the Raj, Afghanistan has been and independent kingdom, a Soviet satellite, the graveyard of a great many Soviet troops, a theocracy and finally an occupied western satellite. Stability isn’t really part of Afghan history.

In the modern world economy, Afghanistan isn’t really terribly valuable real estate. No oil to speak of, no gold, diamonds, uranium, computer industry, heavy or light manufacturing, and it’s pretty crummy farmland for the most part. But opium poppies grow awfully well there. The Chinese had a prohibition on opium long before the fall of Rome, and frankly, today’s anti-drug war is about as effective. All that prohibition does is drive up the price to the consumer, funnel the money into the hands of people who are by definition criminals, and they buy huge quantities of arms to protect their profits. Local warlords maintain their independence from Kabul by supplying junkies in Berlin, Paris and Chicago.

And the existence of these narco-militias makes Mr. Karzai’s job especially difficult. In Columbia, the war on drugs has kept a civil war alive for almost two generations. In Afghanistan, the challenge is to get the men with the guns to follow orders from Kabul rather than the local big-shot. More than likely, the local warlord/drug dealer will have to be bribed into following Kabul’s line. And if that can happen in a country with four large and distinct ethnic groups (Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, with smatterings of Aimak, Turkmen and Baloch), it will count as a huge feat.

Right now, the odds are against Mr. Karzai. While called President of Afghanistan, his power is more like Mayor of Kabul. The local big-shots remain the key. The western forces propping up his regime are insufficient to bring his writ into the countryside. The 140,000 misdeployed Americans in Iraq might have made the difference a year or two ago, but it’s too late now.

© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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