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February
26, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
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Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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February 26,
2002
Kabul's Loss
By Jonathan Steele
The wheel of fortune turns and Afghanistan's longest-serving
prime minister of recent times sits in a modest flat on a council
estate near Clapham Junction.
Unfortunately, the open-mindedness with
which John Major's government gave refuge to Sultan Ali Keshtmand
and his wife Karima (who used to run the country's kindergarten
programme) is not so evident when it comes to inviting skilled
Afghans to go home now that peace is in the air.
The Keshtmands are two among hundreds
of thousands of Afghan men and women who served their country
or graduated from medical, teacher training and engineering faculties
in the 1980s. Spread around Europe and, to a lesser extent, the
US, they represent a vast reservoir of talent which ought to
be tapped by the new government of Hamid Karzai.
So far progress is scant, though everyone
pays lip service to the idea of getting trained Afghans back.
In Britain, a Home Office working group will soon hold its first
meeting with Afghan refugee organisations. The EU is also on
the case. A key issue will be whether Afghans are offered short-term
contracts to "try things out", with a salary upgrade
subsidised by foreign aid. Lack of security is the main deterrent.
Few will give up their residency rights in Europe or European-level
incomes until they are sure Afghanistan is safe.
But there is another obstacle, which
makes the Afghan diaspora different. Most professionals, particularly
those in the vigorous "middle generation" now in their
30s and 40s, were members of the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan, the Soviet-backed communists, or they lived in Kabul
and other cities in the PDPA time.
Many complain they are being penalised
by the Karzai government, which is dominated by royalists from
the pre-communist period and rightwing mojahedin factions who
took up arms to resist communist rule. The Kabul government's
prejudice is shared by many western columnists and officials,
either consciously or through ignorance.
In spite of the recent attention given
to Afghanistan, basic facts about its history remain unknown.
Writing from Kabul, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times's main
commentator on international affairs, compared the city to the
World Trade Centre site in New York. Half the Afghan capital
was in ruins, he wrote, "thanks to 22 years of civil war".
With a little homework, he could have discovered that until 1992,
when the communist regime imploded, Kabul was virtually untouched.
Soviet troops seized the capital overnight
in December 1979 with scarcely a shot fired and for the next
13 years the mojahedin could do no more than launch occasional
long-range rockets. Their attacks were untargeted. They sometimes
killed civilians but the city's housing, hospitals, and other
public buildings were barely scratched. Kabul's destruction took
place between 1992 and 1995 after the mojahedin entered the city
and fought among themselves.
Mark Malloch Brown, the administrator
of the United Nations development programme, will be a key figure
in Afghanistan's reconstruction. Yet, at the donors' con ference
in Tokyo, he revealed similar gaps in knowledge. Afghanistan,
he said, had not had a police force "for 20 years".
During the PDPA period, most Afghan cities from Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif
and Kunduz to Jalalabad were not prey to local commanders, warlords
or bandits, and people lived securely with normal urban police.
The Afghan war of the 1980s was ruthless,
but the Russians fought it in the countryside. Far from being
paralysed, Afghan cities enjoyed a huge surge in education and
healthcare. Kabul had a one-party system but, with numerous functioning
mosques and a thriving market economy, it was more liberal than
anywhere in Soviet central Asia. Had they not been allied to
Moscow, the PDPA would be praised today as the most competent
modernisers in Afghan history.
Hamid Karzai, the current Afghan leader,
seems to be an intelligent moderniser himself, a devout Muslim
but not an Islamist. He deserves support. The weakness is that
he is also an admirer of Zahir Shah, the ex-king whose reign
is trumpeted as a golden age when women could dress freely. So
they did, but what the king started, the PDPA multiplied. "People
think the 1980s didn't exist," says Keshtmand. Yet one thousand
male and female doctors were graduating annually, equal to the
number in the entire 50 years of Zahir Shah and his cousin, Mohammed
Daoud, who followed. In their time there were five kindergartens
in Kabul and none elsewhere. We built 400."
He may be too old to return, but others
who fled fundamentalist rule say Karzai and his western supporters
are not making them feel wanted. The PDPA no longer exists. The
two original factions, the Parcham and the Khalq which jockeyed
for control over it, have split and shrunk. A younger group condemns
the leadership of both wings. Most of the old members, if they
seek a political role at all, believe Afghanistan must make a
fresh start. The bitterness of the civil war has to be set aside.
But the country needs a modern, secular leftwing party which
can compete with the monarchists and the former mojahedin.
The Bonn conference which chose Afghanistan's
interim government failed to represent this broad current of
thinking adequately. The government has only one minister who
is ex-PDPA. The commission which will prepare the loya jirga
is similarly narrow. Karzai, western donors and UN mandarins
must correct the bias.
They need to promote a climate of national
reconciliation, welcome back the "PDPA generation",
and prove there is no blacklist. Otherwise Afghanistan will repeat
the sad pattern of Bosnia, Kosovo and other international protectorates.
Billions of dollars of "aid" will go to western consultants
for interminable feasibility studies or to mafia businessmen
looking for a quick buck. The doctors, engineers, and teachers
who know the country because it is their own will stay away.
Jonathan Steele
writes for the London Guardian.
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