Enduring Operation Enduring Freedom
As it happens, things probably won't be quite so decisively "over" for everybody. Look at Iraq, for example. The last American troops drove out of Iraq in December 2011, leaving behind a staff of at least 16,000, including 5,000 private security contractors, assigned to the vast $750 million fortress of a U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. That war has now been over for almost two years, the embassy staff is being trimmed, and yet, the drumbeat of news about car bombs, suicide bombers, and the latest rounds of sectarian cleansing has not slackened. Nearly 6,000 Iraqis have been killed so far this year, 1,000 in July alone, making it the deadliest month in Iraq since 2008. Even Iraqis who lived through the war in their own homes are now fleeing, like millions of Iraqis before them -- many the victims of sectarian cleansing practiced during the American-led "surge" of 2007 and now polished to a fine art. From the foreign diplomatic corps in Baghdad come informal messages that include the words "worse than ever."
In Afghanistan, too, as the end of a longer war supposedly draws near, the rate at which civilians are being killed has actually picked up, and the numbers of women and children among the civilian dead have risen dramatically. This week, as the Nation magazine devotes a special issue to a comprehensive study of the civilian death toll in Afghanistan -- the painstaking work of Bob Dreyfuss and Nick Turse -- the pace of civilian death seems only to be gaining momentum as if in some morbid race to the finish.
Like Iraqis, Afghans, too, are in flight -- fearing the unknown end game to come. The number of Afghans filing applications for asylum in other countries, rising sharply since 2010, reached 30,000 in 2012. Undocumented thousands flee the country illegally in all sorts of dangerous ways. Their desperate journeys by land and sea spark controversy in countries they're aiming for. It was Afghan boat people who roused the anti-immigrant rhetoric of candidates in the recent Australian elections, revealing a dark side of the national character even as Afghans and others drowned off their shores. War reverberates, even where you least expect it.
Afghans who remain at home are on edge. Their immediate focus: the presidential election scheduled for April 5, 2014. It's already common knowledge that the number of existing voter cards far exceeds the number of eligible voters, and millions more are being issued to new registrants, making it likely that this presidential contest will be as fraudulent as the last, in 2009, when voter cards were sold by the handful.
With President Hamid Karzai constitutionally barred from a third term, the presidential race is either wide open, or -- as many believe -- already a done deal. In August, Afghan news services reported that Karzai had chaired a meeting with a few of the country's most powerful warlords to call for the candidacy of Abdul Rab Rasoul Sayyaf, intimidator of women in parliament, longtime pal of Osama bin Laden, mentor of al-Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, likely collaborator in the assassination two days before 9/11 of the Taliban's greatest opponent, Ahmad Shah Massoud -- in short the quintessential untouchable jihadi.
There's an irony so ludicrous as to be terrible in the thought that while the U.S. supposedly fought this interminable war to insure that al-Qaeda would never again find a haven in Afghanistan, the country's next president could be the very guy who invited bin Laden to Afghanistan in the first place and became his partner in building al-Qaeda training camps.
Even Karzai, who likes to poke his finger in American eyes, quickly backed away from that insult. Within hours of the news reports, he announced that he would remain "neutral." Americans scarcely seemed to notice, but Afghans noted what Karzai had done in the first place. Now, as Sayyaf and other potential candidates do backroom deals, jockeying for position, Afghans wait anxiously to learn which ones will actually register to run before the October 6th deadline.
The names bandied about are those of the usual suspects: familiar militia commanders from times past, former jihadis, and political hacks. At this writing, a coalition of some of the most powerful are said to be aligning behind former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah , who came in second to Karzai's overstuffed ballot boxes in 2009 and declined to take part in a runoff likely to be just as fixed by fraud. One Afghan politico, surveying a recent gathering of likely candidates, expressed to the Washington Post an opinion widely held by Afghans: "These are the people who destroyed our country. They should all be thrown down a well." Beleaguered Afghans have lived through all of this with all of them before. Sometimes it ends in a crooked election. Sometimes in a coup. Once in recent memory, in a civil war that could go into reruns.
Meanwhile, Karzai has also been tampering with the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), a government body headed by Nobel Peace Prize nominee Dr. Sima Samar, and the most respected public body in the country precisely because it has maintained its independence from government politics. In December 2011, Karzai blocked the AIHRC's nonpartisan work by allowing the terms of three of its most effective members to expire. Another respected member had been killed earlier in 2011, together with her husband and four children, by a Taliban suicide-bomber reportedly aiming for officials of Xe (formerly Blackwater, now Academi) in a Kabul supermarket. The members Karzai cut loose included Ahmad Nader Nadery, an assiduous researcher of war crimes, largely responsible for a "Mapping Project," never officially released, that reportedly names prominent warlords and members of Karzai's government.
After stalling for 18 months, last July Karzai stacked the AIHRC staff with five political cronies unqualified in human rights. They include an Army general, a member of an Islamist fundamentalist political party, and a mullah who served in the Taliban government, spent three years in the U.S. military prison at Bagram (without being charged), considers Shariah law the best source of human rights legislation, and opposes laws currently on the books that aim to protect women from violence.
In September Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, made a rare personal visit to Kabul to urge Karzai to reconsider his appointments before the AIHRC lost its international "A" rating and donor nations were forced to rethink their aid to a repressive government. She left with no assurances, repeating her concern that "improvement in human rights" had not merely "peaked" in Afghanistan, but was "in reality waning."
Down and Out in Afghanistan
Now that the end of the international occupation approaches, the story of its success is undergoing a peculiar revision. The stunning advances Washington claimed in Afghanistan seem somehow much smaller and so much less impressive. Education, health care, and human rights, just like the fabled MRAP, have not lived up to their publicity.
For example, Western leaders have taken particular pride in supposed advances in Afghan education since the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, in schools built and students enrolled by the millions. (The U.S. Agency for International Development alone spent $934 million on Afghan education in the last 12 years.) But UNICEF reports that almost half the "schools" supposedly built or opened have no actual buildings, and in those that do, students double up on seats and share antiquated texts. Teachers are scarce and fewer than a quarter of those now teaching are considered "qualified," even by Afghanistan's minimal standards. Impressive school enrollment figures determine how much money a school gets from the government, but don't reveal the much smaller numbers of enrollees who actually attend. No more than 10% of students, mostly boys, finish high school. In 2012, according to UNICEF, only half of school-age children went to school at all.
Advances in Afghan health care have been another source of Western donors' pride. But dramatic claims that 85% of Afghans now have access to basic health care turn out to mean only that something called a "health care facility" exists in 85% of Afghan districts, many of which are enormous. Tens of thousands of Afghans now have "access" to health care facilities only because they fled their war-torn provinces for refugee camps on the fringes of major cities. The country's high rates of maternal and infant mortality have slightly improved but remain among the worst in the world. You have to wonder if Washington couldn't have turned all that MRAP money to better purpose.
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