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| Interviewee: | Barnett R. Rubin, New York University |
|---|---|
| Interviewer: | Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor |
July 14, 2004
Barnett Rubin, a leading specialist on Afghanistan and the author of several books on that country, criticizes what he sees as the Bush administration’s insistence on using its 17,000 troops in Afghanistan to fight a “war we cannot win” against the Taliban. Instead, he says, the United States should combine those troops with the NATO force of 6,500 to enhance nationwide stability.
Rubin, formerly the director of the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations and now director of studies at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, says that, overall, “The question is whether the glass if one-tenth full or nine-tenths empty. We have a long way to go in Afghanistan.” He was interviewed on July 14, 2004, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, in an interview published in the July 12 New York Times, said he was more worried about the Afghan militias than he was about the Taliban. Is the glass in Afghanistan half full or half empty?
The correct figure is not “half.” The question is whether the glass if one-tenth full or nine-tenths empty. We have a long way to go in Afghanistan.
Please explain.
The United States defeated the Taliban by using air power, U.S. Special Forces, and small CIA teams that strengthened the forces of the Northern Alliance and other commanders in a country where the state administration, which was always weak, had broken down.
That means that these armed commanders— those we now call “warlords”--became the real powers in the country, using the money and weapons they received from the United States. They are able to control whatever administration exists in their areas because the central government is so relatively weak. That means that they are now strongly opposed to the consolidation of the central government and the provision of security in a way that would make possible the rule of law, the legal economic development of the country, and ultimately the building of more democratic institutions— although we should not have unrealistic expectations about how long it will take Afghanistan to evolve into something like a genuine democracy.
How does the Taliban fit into this?
The Taliban insurgency, while it still of course depends on its sanctuaries in Pakistan— which has essentially done nothing to stop the Taliban from organizing on its territory— is also feeding off of people’s discontent at two things: One, the domination of the government by those warlords, the most powerful of whom are from the non-Pashtun ethnic groups in northern Afghanistan, whereas the Taliban are recruiting from the Pashtun in southern Afghanistan. And the second reason is the actions of the United States forces in Afghanistan. Of course, just as in Iraq, but on a much lesser scale, when the United States forces undertake house searches, when they arrest people, when they brutalize people in captivity, this creates not only resentment but, in a tribal society, it also creates obligations of revenge. So people will join the Taliban because they now feel obligated to kill an American because Americans have killed some of their relatives.
Underlying this whole situation is an economic trend which, if not reversed, will make the stabilization of the country completely impossible. And that is the growth of the opium economy. The Taliban had succeeded in more or less halting the growth of opium poppy production, though they did not stop the trade. In 2001, the harvest in Afghanistan was estimated at about 190 tons of raw opium. Last year, it was over 3,000 tons. This year, it will be over 4,000 tons. That constitutes 75 percent of the world’s supply.
It is shipped for export through Pakistan?
Some is shipped through Pakistan, and a lot of it goes through Iran. The Iranians, however, are fighting a real war against drugs and it has become more difficult to smuggle through Iran, so an increasing amount is going out through northern Afghanistan into the states of the former Soviet Union.
Now, because of an increase in supply, the price to the farmers has gone down this year. Last year, the estimates from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations Office of Drug Control were that the total opium economy produced $1 billion for the farmers and $1.3 billion for the traffickers and processors. That is to say, a total of $2.3 billion, which was approximately half the size of the legal economy of Afghanistan, much of which depended on the drug economy because the drug economy created the demand for construction, for vehicles, and for imports— and provided the foreign exchange to pay for those imports. The drug economy is the major source of reconstruction funding in Afghanistan, not international assistance. That means, of course, that the people who provide the drug money are more influential than foreigners who provide assistance.
Three weeks ago, I was in Vienna and met with Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the United Nations Office of Drug Control. I met with him in the afternoon. That morning he had just returned to Vienna after spending two or three weeks in northern Afghanistan and the adjacent areas of central Asia. What he told me was extremely alarming. He said that what security officials in the field had reported to him was that 80 percent of the time when they seized drugs coming across the border from Afghanistan, they are not seizing raw opium gum, they are seizing heroin. That means that the vast majority of the opium in Afghanistan is now being refined into heroin inside of Afghanistan. That means that while the income to the farmers will go down [because of supply increases], the income to the processors and traffickers and the warlords, who are often in partnership with those people, will go way up. There will be a lot more criminal money in the country.
Bear in mind that the domestic revenue of the Afghan government last year, the amount it was able to raise from taxes, was $200 million. It had a total budget of $500 million. It tried to cover the rest of that budget with economic aid but, of course, the foreign governments don’t like to give money to budgetary support. They like to give it to their own nationals for projects. So the government, with an income of $200 million and a budget of $500 million, is trying to compete with people who have a multi-billion dollar criminal industry at their disposal to gain people’s loyalty and to use it to form armed groups.
Who is going to win this contest? President Karzai gave himself a “D” in meeting people’s expectations. Strangely enough, President Bush said when he met with President Karzai in the White House on June 15 that Afghanistan’s progress has been “dramatic” But President Karzai gave himself a “D,” because the warlords are bigger obstacles to stabilization of the country than the Taliban.
What is the U.S. policy toward the warlords?
The United States policy was initially to fund them and to arm them. And it warned the Afghan government to be careful when it tried to deal with them. The United States refused for the entire first year that its troops were in Afghanistan to participate in the disarming or demobilization of those people. It opposed the expansion of the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] outside of Kabul, where it would have helped the government to gain some leverage over these warlords.
ISAF is the United Nations-mandated force?
Yes. It is currently under NATO command. The United States has refused to participate in that force because the United States says its job is only to fight against the Taliban and al Qaeda and not to be part of ISAF and help take on what President Karzai says is the main threat to his government.
The United States has some 17,000 troops in Afghanistan and NATO has some 6,500?
Yes.
And the United States refuses to help the NATO force?
That’s correct. We say we do “war fighting” and NATO does “stabilization operations,” apparently forgetting that we are a member of NATO.
Which of the warlords pose the greatest danger to Karzai?
The problem is not these individuals, per se. If you remove these particular individuals without creating a different system, it won’t make any difference. So, I don’t want to make any personalized attacks on certain individuals. I think what many people in Afghanistan object to is the fact that the central government is largely composed of warlords. In fact, the most powerful such commander in the central government is the minister of defense, Qasem Fahim Khan, who has still not fulfilled his obligation under the [2001] Bonn agreement [on the make-up of a post-Taliban government] to withdraw his military forces from Kabul. Annex 1 of the Bonn agreement says that the parties to the agreement will remove their forces from Kabul as the ISAF is deployed there. He has not withdrawn his forces from Kabul. He claims it does not apply to him.
In addition, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf [a former mujahadeen] has his “10th Division.” He is not a military commander. [The division] is commanded by a relative. That force is based just outside of Kabul in the town of Paghman, but also deploys into parts of Kabul. Sayyaf’s forces have been responsible over the years for innumerable killings, executions of prisoners. They terrorize at times the inhabitants of western Kabul, most of whom are ethnic Hazaars and Shiites, while [Sayyaf’s forces] are Pashtuns and Sayyaf is known as a Wahhabi, which is very anti-Shiite. Recently, there was a proposal in the Cabinet to dissolve that 10th Division as a part of the demobilization program, and the Cabinet, under pressure, did not agree to that. It is unclear what the U.S. position is. The Cabinet said it would downsize the division, but that is meaningless, because all these commanders have greatly overstated the number of men they have.
I take it that you are extremely gloomy about Afghanistan’s prospects.
The way I would put it is that there is a tremendous number of wonderful things going on in Afghanistan that are very encouraging. But the conditions for them to succeed do not yet exist. The people there are more optimistic than they have been in years. They have a lot of hope. I don’t want to denigrate the things that are going on. I think that even some of the people I am calling “warlords” would, given an alternative, like to take part in those positive developments.
What are the positive developments?
You have a government which is actually making an effort to provide services to people. They have opened schools; there is a record school enrollment in the country. They have programs to try to improve health services. They are trying to rebuild roads. They have a strategy for economic development of the country. They are working trying to reform the civil service. They have passed a new constitution, which I was involved in to some extent as an adviser to the constitutional commission. They have had two loya jirgas, which were the two most representative democratic bodies that have ever been assembled in Afghanistan. These bodies freely and openly debated the genuine issues before the country. People got angry, but they did not use any violence. People from all over the country discussed these things with each other.
I think there is tremendous will on the part of the people in Afghanistan to rebuild their national unity, to rebuild their institutions. This will exist even among people who now, for various reasons, may be creating certain obstacles because of their suspicions, the legacy of the past, and so on. Women have gone back to work. A lot of new organizations have been set up. They are doing research on domestic violence. Voter registration for the presidential election in October is being carried out. I just got the latest statistics by email this morning, and they show that, as of July 10, there were 6.8 million voters registered in Afghanistan, which is very significant progress toward an estimated total of 9 to 10 million. Of those total voters registered, almost 40 percent— 39.7 percent— are women.
If Democratic Senator John F. Kerry wins the election, will Washington’s policy toward Afghanistan change?
I’m not sure. I’m actually attempting to help the Kerry campaign formulate a policy on Afghanistan, but so far, it has not been adopted by the candidate, so far as I know. Kerry and John Edwards have a track record on Afghanistan, and especially Edwards. Edwards was very outspoken in favor of the expansion of the ISAF, much more than would be normally required from a junior senator from North Carolina, with no background in foreign affairs.
And of course, Senator Joseph Biden, [D-Del.], who is one of Senator Kerry’s main foreign policy advisers, has been very consistent on Afghanistan, offering positions which are more or less identical to the ones I have articulated. I am hoping that, if Senator Biden has an influential role in the foreign policy of a Kerry administration, we will see some change in the right direction.
What are your main recommendations?
My main recommendation is that we change the balance in United States military policy toward stabilization in Afghanistan and away from just trying to fight a war against the Taliban, which is a war we cannot win if we treat it as a military problem.
To do that you would combine the U.S. forces with the NATO forces?
There are a whole bunch of things we need to do. And I won’t say the Bush administration is not doing any of them. Some of them they are doing and some of them I don’t know if they are. But first of all, we need a political settlement with as much of the Taliban as possible, because part of the problem is we are trying to pursue a post-conflict program in a situation where the conflict is going on. There is no peace agreement with the Taliban. There are many objectionable things about the Taliban, but the only thing that makes them ineligible for negotiation is shielding Osama bin Laden and so on. There are plenty of people in the Taliban who didn’t want to give up their program just for the sake of al Qaeda. To the extent that we can work with those people— some of whom are in fact talking to the Afghan government— that will enable us to have a political settlement with many of the people supporting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. That will in turn make it possible to have a decisive change in the stability operations.
We need to empower the Afghan government a lot more by giving more of our reconstruction assistance through channels the Afghan government controls. If we join ISAF with our forces under NATO, I believe it will be much more likely that other NATO members will in turn come forward with greater troop contributions. I am not a French-basher usually, and I actually agreed with the French position on Iraq, but they are being totally irresponsible about Afghanistan in blocking NATO deployments to ISAF [because of the U.S.] elections. That’s sacrificing Afghanistan to their quarrel with George Bush.
Is it true that there is a split in the Taliban?
At the moment, the Taliban does not have a coherent organization. They have a paramount leader who issues some kinds of directives. They have a number of independent commanders, and there are many, many people affiliated with the Taliban or others who are not under any hierarchical command and control. The former foreign minister of the Taliban, Wakil Ahmed, is now in government custody. President Karzai told me that Ahmed has written a very nice letter about the need to stabilize the country and reconstruct it. They are having discussions with other Taliban leaders. There are signs that people who were affiliated with the Taliban want to join the political process.
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