Opinion & Commentary
What future exists for Afghanistan? Any solution must address the drug trade and the plight of women
The lands of central Asia have a sorry history of warfare, dating back to the times of the “silk road” linking Europe and Asia. My “mission” notes from thirty years ago argued that there was no other future for Afghanistan.
At the time, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both active in Afghanistan for years, could put its population no closer than 12 to 19 million. Nomadic tribes moved between Afghanistan and neighbouring countries in search of pastures and smuggling opportunities. The tribes reported to feudal chieftains. Their approach to life was direct: if they fancied a watch, they chopped off the hand that wore it.
Landlords mercilessly squeezed peasants that farmed the few areas where water was sufficient. Abuse of persons, particularly women and children, was common. Food was scarce. The Taliban have exacerbated droughts by their crazy policies, but they did not invent them. It was already evident in the early 1970s that the only viable commercial crop was heroin. It was cheap to produce and, together with the even cheaper local version of marijuana, it made ‘chicken’ street in Kabul the drug centre of the hippy world.
Some liberal ideas were seeping through, but feudalism did not permit ‘trickle down’ to raise living standards. The landlords took the immediate rewards of growing poppies and the feudal chiefs collected the much greater, and continually growing, income from the drug trade. Because it was illegal, the heroin trade not only funded 30 years of escalating warfare in Afghanistan, but spilled over to fund terrorism in the Balkans, Chechnya, Kashmir, Africa and ultimately the United States.
Afghan elites were corrupt through and through. Badly paid bureaucrats exacted a ”tax” on all transactions to make a living, and the definition of a “living” escalated with seniority. The Royal Court was the epicentre of corruption. I met the head chauffeur who procured children in the town. In 1977 I wrote in an official memo that “even in Kabul heads of professional families fear (ed) for their families”.
Aid workers thrived. The International Monetary Fund had a staff member at the central bank and there were frequent Fund and World Bank “missions”. The United States, Canada, Germany, France and Scandinavian countries had resident “missions”; there were Russians and blue suited Chinese comrades. The latter were probably the most effective. They built a textile factory totally staffed by women workers who could doff their burqas at the door.
The aid scene had a light side. Australians became interested in assisting sheep-grazing for alphabetic reasons - they had got to know Afghan bureaucrats while sitting next to them during long and tedious UN meetings. Americans were trying to get the peasants to grow corn instead of poppies, a hopeless endeavour that I had already encountered in the “golden triangle”. The Germans thought camomile would do the job. Russian apparatchiks, undeterred by my struggling Russian, tried to engage World Bank support for double entry book-keeping in the truck assembly factory that was Kabul’s principal industrial enterprise. Accounting was alive and well in the bazaars, but the truck factory’s books remained opaque to enable the management to steal the output.
The Royal Court’s corruption became so extreme that it had to flee. Robert McNamara’s World Bank enthusiastically responded to the Socialist Government’s Seven Year Development Plan, provided it would respect “Afghanistan’s unique traditional society”. With its emphasis on crop based agriculture, the Plan was as nonsensical as the notion that it could be implemented by feudal chiefs. A little progress was made in the 1970s, notably in enrolling women in higher education, but the Socialist government lacked domestic support. It called in Soviet troops. Marijuana and heroin tore into their efforts (as it did in Vietnam) in the bitter fighting that followed. Most educated people left so that liberal ideas withered. The Taliban took power. At least two million Afghans fled to neighbouring countries, and wherever possible, further afield.
These are not simply notes from the past. According to The New Yorker of the 24th of September, 2001: “Just four months ago, at a time when the whole world was aware both of the general intentions of the terrorist Osama bin Laden and of the fact that the Afghan government was harbouring him, the United States gave the Taliban a forty-three-million-dollar grant for banning poppy cultivation”.
A picnic in the Hindu Kush
I travelled the road that Soviet aid built from Kabul to Uzbekistan some 30 years ago. As we moved north in the midsummer dawn, the sun shone on majestically white peaks in a sere landscape scarcely interrupted by mud hut villages. In a township, big-eyed boys in a market tried out their English. In Kabul some women worked in schools, a hospital or two, a few offices and shops, and they were to be seen and to see on the street, but in the country there were only little girls up to the age of ten or so. Older girls and women could only catch a blinkered glimpse of the world.
In the foothills peasants lived off what was left when the landlord took his share from a grove of mulberry trees. They ate fresh mulberries in summer and dried mulberries for as long as they lasted. And that was it. The coming of the Soviet road spelled some cash earnings, first in digging tunnels and building terraces and then in maintenance. After heavy snowfalls, the terraces had to be cleared. The worse the weather, the more merciful was Allah. We were travelling through what had become a relatively prosperous part of Afghanistan.
The road was essentially one lane with rock faces on one side and precipices on the other. Huge Soviet built trucks lumbered out of the mist from time to time. The drivers played ‘chicken’ when two vehicles approached each other. The last one to swerve was the winner. There were surprisingly few wrecks by the side of the road.
We turned back in the early afternoon to picnic in a meadow by the side of a rushing river with our Planning Office counterparts. An Uzbek cook, reputed to make the best shashlik in Kabul, presided over succulent lamb, rosemary, tomatoes and onions.
I became aware that on the cliff on the other side of the river fully shrouded women and some little girls were gradually forming an audience. I was upset to think that they had come to watch a feast that they could not enjoy. My embarrassment grew as little girls came rushing down the cliff path, consulted with our minders, raced back up the hill, and up and down again several times. Anxiously I waited for translations. The women were not interested in our food. They had come to see foreigners (who included an Egyptian and a Korean) and an unveiled (albeit decently clad in pants and long sleeved top) woman. They wanted to know which of the men was my husband! Prolonged disbelief and consultations followed the answer of “none”. My husband was at home, working at his job and minding our sons.
What was I doing there? Even longer consultations after the minders said that I was the “chief” of the group of visiting officials. That was clearly impossible. Much discussion up and down the cliff. As this astonishing news spread, more and more women appeared on the cliff until there were more about forty. And then I asked: “what did they think of a woman travelling unveiled and being in charge of a group of male officials? The answer came back loud and clear, as it did in many similar situations in several Middle Eastern countries: “if this was the future, that was what these women wanted for their daughters!”
What Afghan women have under Taliban rule is extreme repression. They can not learn to read and write. They cannot work to earn money. They cannot be part of society. They have become chattels. Those who do not “belong” to a man have to beg or become prostitutes. And who sleep with the prostitutes? The Taliban men.
The abuses traditional in Afghan villages have become institutionalised in this religious state. There has been no attempt to hide the savagery against women. The Taliban boast about it, filming pictures of women being whipped in the street because their burqas have slipped.
There is nothing in the Koran to justify the abuse of women. Yet there has not been even muted criticism of Taliban practices from Muslim communities. Instead, rent–a-crowds are rioting to support the regime. When Idi Amin’s rule became a by-word for butchery, Tanzania invaded Uganda to put an end to him. Vietnam ended the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. Why haven’t its neighbours come to the rescue of Afghanistan’s women?
What sort of government could work for Afghanistan?
Afghanistan has never been a nation, let alone a kingdom. Its rugged mountains and deserts were left over after neighbouring empires fought themselves to a standstill. The only political framework likely to provide stability would have to be federal so that the various ethnic groups could rule themselves. With some basic common legal and commercial rules, a loose state, centred on several local capitals, could possibly work. Such a concept would, however, be extremely difficult for warring tribes that have been pushed toward national conquest by their external supporters.
Afghanistan cannot find peace while it is a centre of illegal drug traffic. The “golden triangle” and Colombia show how illegal drug trade affects supplying regions. The “war on drugs”, that has created vast criminal opportunities in producing as well as consuming countries, has gone nowhere in more than 30 years in reducing drug abuse. Now that the profits of making drugs illegal have funded atrocities against consuming countries as well as in producing countries, a way to deal with drugs as a medical rather than a criminal problem must surely be tackled. Afghanistan (and others) will go on growing poppies while it is so highly profitable to do so. It is as ludicrous as ever to think that in a “new” Afghanistan, happy peasants will turn to corn, camomile or some other crop of aid-bureaucrats’ choice. Only if the trade in drugs becomes legal will the super profits disappear as they did when prohibition ended in the United States. Afghanistan would then have some chance of reducing the corruption and terrorism that the illegal drug trade engenders.
In the short term, because of the years of fighting and the rule of the Taliban, Afghanistan has an internal and external refugee problem of huge proportions. Several million are on the road, in camps on the borders, and in neighbouring countries. Gaols are full of starving political prisoners. Women and children who have not been able to get away because they have no man to take them, are in hiding. For most of these displaced people there is nothing to go back to. Their flight has been in progress for more than ten years, growing as the Taliban increased its grip on the country and destroyed livelihoods. They need food, water, shelter, medical care and schools to occupy children and adults. Relief flows are essential, but every effort should be made to limit the number of foreign relief workers and allow Afghan women and men to undertake the distribution of aid.
Afghanistan did not have a viable economy thirty years ago. There is not enough grazing land, let alone crop areas, to support a large rural population at decent living standards. Porous borders made it possible for the nomads to make a living only until neighbouring countries, and Afghanistan itself, sought to settle them. Afghanistan’s main asset is its tough, hardworking and business oriented population. To make a living in the modern world it only needs education and training.
Small entrepreneurs were active in the 1970s in curing and working skins, in shoe and clothing manufacture and in other processing where they were not undermined by state enterprises. Tourism would flourish if the country were at peace.
In the 1960s and 1970s, aid from both sides of the Cold War was not only ludicrous, but destabilising. It encouraged the growth of a central bureaucracy that reaped most of the benefits. In most agricultural projects, landlords were the winners. Corruption grew exponentially to copy the lifestyles of the aid “missionaries”.
The road to the north, which had some value for getting goods to markets, has been made all but impassable by fighting. The other aid projects have left no trace. An entirely new approach to aid is needed. What about giving families, whether headed by a woman or by a man, a substantial cash sum to rebuild their houses and livelihoods? Some will be able to do so and others will go to work for them. The economy can take off from there. No aid workers would be needed.
Current discussions about the future of Afghanistan do not give any weight to principles that would constitute an acceptable government: freedom of speech and the press, of religion (notably among various Muslim groups), equality before the law and representative government are nowhere in sight.
The UN in particular seems to be continuing past power struggles. Any government that does not include a commitment to the equal treatment of women does not deserve consideration. A substantial representation of the women who challenge the Taliban everyday, risking their lives merely by organising schools for girls, would provide some guarantee that a provisional government had some validity.
