KABUL: The Pashtun warlord’s son arranged our audience in the plush living room of a villa thronged by petitioners and guarded by men dressed in army uniforms, armed with machine-guns and RPGs. “I’m not standing for money or personal benefit but because I believe that all Afghans should serve the poor and the needy,” Gol Rahman Hamdard said in excellent English, explaining that he had given up a well-paying job working at a construction company in order to stand for parliament. “I’m an anti-corruption candidate.”
Later, I found out that Hamdard’s father, a controversial governor who had been run out of several provinces on maladministration charges, owned a construction company and was active in funnelling pro-Taliban Pashtuns into demographically sensitive areas critical for his son’s election. It all gave new significance to the only charge that Gol Rahman had made during our interview: accusing the governor of Balkh Province—a rival of his father’s—of arming militias.
“As a Westerner, you shouldn’t try to understand the politics and motivations,” a university professor later advised me. “This is Afghanistan.” Yet, I had just spent an hour nodding enthusiastically at Gol Rahman’s “anti-corruption” rhetoric, so I felt a little foolish at my gullibility. Arguably, my reaction is not that different from how the international community feels after nearly a decade’s involvement in Afghanistan.
Afghan realities
“So much money has been poured into this country, so many lives lost, yet there is still immense ungratefulness on the part of its people and government,” said one Western consultant who requested that his name not be published. Another Western consultant with several years of experience in Afghanistan once let me into the secret of how the game is played here by men who are either naive or wilfully blind.
Meetings are the cornerstone of an aid merry-go-round funded by a seemingly unending foreign donor-backed monetary supply. At regular intervals or “milestones,” my friend said, terribly well-meaning members of the international community meet up with Western-educated government members and representatives of the NATO militaries to discuss “progress.” The Afghan ministry officials, whose polished English and Western-friendly terminology Gol Rahman Hamdard had made sure to echo, are appointed by less refined power-brokers to act as screens. Speaking technocratese, they reassure the representatives of the international community that all targets are being hit, all deadlines met.
As the meeting comes to an end, the exorbitantly-paid Western consultants breathe a sigh of relief that they can continue drawing the taxpayer-funded “danger pay” that enables their lifestyles: well-guarded villas, the frequenting of apartheid restaurants where entry is banned for Afghan nationals, and regular “decompression” breaks to Goa. The Western diplomats hustle in their bulletproof convoys back to their embassies from which they compose optimistic reports for their governments stressing the necessity of continuing the “commitment” to Afghanistan. The generals repair to their headquarters from where they plan further campaigns for “marginalising” or “degrading” the insurgency. And the Westernised Afghan civil servants return to the bosom of extended tribal structures rife with vested interests and nepotism whose acceptable front they represent.
The above character-types do not represent all the aid-workers, diplomats, NATO military or Afghan government officials active in Afghanistan. But they are an expression of a dominant psychology that keeps this merry-go-round spinning by ensuring all stakeholders are satisfied. There is simply not enough incentives to get out of the rut. Sure, there’s a lot of financial wastage (not to mention the Afghan and foreign soldiers killed and maimed every day in the war’s spreading frontline), but the present arrangement does possess one great advantage: It keeps dormant the problem of how the West can extricate itself from Afghanistan.
Until, that is, the money or the willingness to be in Afghanistan run out. “The difference between the Russians and the Americans is that the Russian central planned economy brought Soviet companies to build directly whereas the Americans introduced the concept of democracy where you build yourself,” Najeeb Peykon, a radio station owner in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, said. “But the direct result of that was that most of the money disappeared into pockets… The past 10 years have seen a blizzard of aid in the absence of the right receptacles for it. It’s ended up destroying even the little existing infrastructure,” he added.
Another international resident in Kabul expanded on the folly the West is involved in. Applying western terms of reference to Afghanistan is meaningless, she said, because to do so would mean expecting this tribally-based society to become a Western nation-state overnight. Levelling nepotism charges at a ministry director who funnels contracts to his cousins is misplaced in a society where the action is interpreted as a show of clan solidarity.
Tainted elections
September’s parliamentary elections are an example of how exorbitant sums are wasted. $200 million was poured into a nationwide exercise billed as bringing democracy to a conflicted land. Though the idea is laudable, the timing and its execution were flawed. As popular disenchantment with the Karzai government has caused the insurgency to spread throughout the country, conditions for a repeat of the parliamentary elections held in that first flush of optimism in 2005 have deteriorated. The fraud-tainted 2009 presidential elections that saw President Karzai return to power have compounded the disillusionment.
“Most people don’t know anything about democracy and have no acquaintance with it,” Peykon sighed. “If you’re from the same ethnic group, then they’ll vote for you. Other people follow the democratic bandwagon as if it’s a caravan. Only a minority understand its true meaning.”
By election day, the Taliban had killed several candidates, hundreds of polling stations remained closed, and at least one in four voters decided to stay home. Not without reason. By the end of a remarkably violent polling day, 32 Afghans had been killed and 95 injured. In the aftermath, more than 4.000 complaints poured in, delaying the release of the final results until forty-five days after the elections (31 October). Videos shot on cameraphones emerged, showing election officials stuffing ballots into boxes under the gaze of local policemen. It seemed that fraud had percolated everywhere, from voters and polling officials to the security forces.
“The key to Afghan politics is capital,” said Peykon. “Those people who were commandants and warlords have entered a new lease of life through the parliament. The new parliament will be a constructed parliament, a pre-planned one. It cannot be called a national parliament.” “We’ll have the same opposition to the government that we had before which was in no way an expression of a parliament working for the people but in fact was fighting the government in favor of entrenched warlord interests,” he added.
Nevertheless, United Nations Special Representative to Afghanistan Stefano di Mistura put a positive spin on the elections, saying, “One must not forget that Afghanistan is still a country in conflict. The fact that elections took place at all, not least in such close succession and during comparatively a more volatile period, is an accomplishment in itself.”
But facts on the ground spoke not so much of a step forward as a retreat. Voters told of unprecedented disillusionment with the process. Many reportedly participated only in order to sell their support to candidates for a one-off fee. The price varied from as little as $10 to $100, according to the candidate’s purchasing power and how demographically crucial the disputed province was. Elsewhere, feudal rules played a role, with local strongmen forcing entire villages to vote for a favored candidate.
It was another clear sign of Afghanistan’s regression that no amount of technocrat-speak could disguise. The cultural experiment to reshape Afghanistan into a modern nation-state constructed along liberal western lines foundered on the crags of the Hindu Kush. Now, as the West heads for the exits, Afghanistan’s countdown clock is ticking louder than at any other time in the past nine years.
Iason Athansiadis – Journalist based in Istanbul. He covers Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Since 1999, he has lived in Cairo, Damascus, Doha, Sana’a and Tehran. Athanasiadis worked as an electoral observer during September's Afghan parliamentary elections
