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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 23, 2001
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
Kalpana
Sharma
Flower
Power:
A Blow for Peace
Tony Mauro
The Quirin
Ruling:
FDR's Horrible Precedent for Bush's Terror Courts
C.G. Estabrook
American
Crusades
November 17, 2001
Zoltan Grossman
It Ain't
Over Til It's Over
November 16, 2001
Rick Giombetti
Rep.
McDermott and
the Decay of Liberalism
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Voices
of Muslim Feminists
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
Resources:
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About 9/11
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
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November
23, 2001
The Northern Alliance Has Won,
So Don't Expect It To Give Up Power
'It is
the guns which will count. They are the symbol of the new Afghanistan
just as they were of the old'
By Patrick Cockburn
The
Independent
Few political movements have come so far so fast.
A month ago, the Northern Alliance was clinging on by its fingertips
in a few strongholds amid the crags of the Hindu Kush mountains.
Today, it is master of Kabul, seems about to take Kunduz and
is preparing to attend talks with other Afghan leaders in Bonn
on Monday. The aim is to set up an interim government for Afghanistan,
uniting all factions and ethnic groups.
The conference is unlikely to succeed.
The Northern Alliance is not eager to share power. Its leader
Burhanuddin Rabbani, newly arrived in Kabul from the mountain
fastness where he has lived for the last few years, says the
meeting in Bonn will be "symbolic". He wants substantive
talks about sharing power to take place in Afghanistan, probably
in Kabul, under the guns of his triumphant soldiers.
And it is the guns which will count.
They are the symbol of the new Afghanistan just as they were
of the old. Stalin's wartime jibe about the importance of the
Vatican - "How many divisions has the Pope" - is wholly
true of Afghan politics. Plans to bring back King Zahir after
28 years in exile will founder on the fact that he has no armed
force at his command. Even if he were to return, he would be
a puppet in somebody's hands.
The problem facing the Northern Alliance
today is similar to that which faced the Taliban until a few
days ago. Its base is too narrow for it to hold on to the power
it has seized. The Taliban was able to capture 90 per cent of
Afghanistan because of Pakistani and Saudi backing. The Northern
Alliance has been able to make its great advances this month
only because of the US air offensive.
The Northern Alliance was extraordinarily
skilful in seizing the opportunity presented by the devastating
attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on 11 September.
Just two days before, it had lost Ahmad Shah Masood, its military
leader, when two assassins, pretending to be television journalists,
blew him up during an interview.
But within days of this disaster, Dr
Abdullah Abdullah, the suave opthalmologist who is the foreign
minister of the Northern Alliance, was arranging for helicopter
loads of journalists to be ferried to the Panjshir valley just
north of Kabul. In a world hungry for news about Afghanistan,
the Northern Alliance received massive publicity. It has never
looked back.
It was an incident over the Japanese
pick-up truck I hired, soon after reaching the Panjshir, to take
me to the different battlefronts, that brought home to me how
weak the Northern Alliance really was. The truck and its driver
cost $100 a day, the high price being fixed by the Northern Alliance
Foreign Ministry. The arrangement worked. The driver was good
and the pick-up did not break down on the horrible Afghan roads.
One day, however, a dozen angry soldiers
arrived at the house I had rented with some other journalists.
Their commander, a tough-looking man in his thirties called Abdul
Rashid, explained the reason for their fury. He said the truck
I was using belonged to him. He had captured it personally from
the Taliban in a battle three years before. The money he received
from me paid for food for himself and 40 men he commanded.
"We have no other income,"
Abdul Rashid said. "Without the money for the truck we will
starve." It turned out that the reason he was so angry was
that the Foreign Ministry wanted as many people as possible to
benefit from the money being paid by foreign journalists. They
intended to supply me with a different driver and vehicle. The
commander wanted me to join him in a joint protest to the Foreign
Ministry, something I refused to do.
Men like Abdul Rashid, after years of
war and poverty in the mountains, will not easily share power
with anybody. And it is local military commanders such as him,
like knights in the Middle Ages in Europe, who are the building
blocks of political power in Afghanistan. It is the defection
or sudden neutrality of these professional soldiers, who have
often fought since their early teens, which determines the outcome
of battles in Afghanistan.
In such a militarised society, stability
is difficult to achieve because the threat of armed force is
always just beneath the surface. It is exacerbated by deep ethnic
divisions. The Pashtuns, on whom the Taliban relied, make up
42 per cent of the population. The Tajiks (25 per cent) and the
Uzbeks (8 per cent) generally stand behind the Northern Alliance.
Massacres, particularly around the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif,
have exacerbated ethnic hatreds over the past five years. Already
the Hazara, Shia Muslims of Mongolian ancestry, who make up 19
per cent of the population, are protesting at the Tajik takeover
of Kabul.
But there are also some reasons for optimism.
Afghans are intensely war weary. There is a deep desire for a
normal life at every level. Afghans with university education
complain that their children are barely literate because the
schools have been destroyed. In the fertile lands of the Shomali
plains north of Kabul, the fields watered by rivers flowing out
of the Hindu Kush, local doctors say that 80 per cent of the
children are malnourished.
Afghans know that they now have an unprecedented
opportunity to obtain foreign aid, but that this requires some
form of civil peace.
The external pressures on Afghanistan
should also be less. The Northern Alliance may exaggerate the
degree to which the Taliban was a catspaw of Pakistani intelligence
- but only by a little bit. Iran and Russia, the traditional
backers of the Northern Alliance, will also want to expand their
influence, but this is likely to be pacific. Neither wants a
confrontation with the US.
Power in Afghanistan is fragmented and
will remain so. Even villages behave like independent republics.
A foreign peace-keeping force might help to reduce the friction
between different parties, armies and ethnic groups. But, as
the UN discovered in Somalia, failure to be seen as wholly neutral
would have disastrous results.
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