October 22, 2001
After the War, Rebuild a Nation. If It's a Nation.
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
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| (James Hill for The New York Times) |
| Three men guarded American food packets dropped by planes overnight in Afghanistan's Takhar province. |
DURING the presidential campaign, George W. Bush repeatedly voiced skepticism about "nation building" outside American borders.
"I'm not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say, 'This is the way it's got to be,"' he said in the second debate with Vice President Al Gore. Now, as president, Mr. Bush may be realizing how right he was to be skeptical.
Shaping nations — so-called nation building — has never been a neat or easy business. This fact seemed to grow in size and urgency on Friday, as United tates Special Forces began operating on the ground in Afghanistan.
Most of the 189 members of the United Nations today are products of revolutions, wars or random lines drawn by colonial powers, and many are kept permanently unstable by unresolved ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes. More often than not, as the United States has learned in places as disparate as Somalia, Congo, the Balkans, Haiti and Israel, efforts to intervene in one conflict often backfire by opening old and sometimes greater wounds in the same place.
The country Mr. Bush now contemplates rebuilding, Afghanistan, is virtually a textbook case of a land where the best intentions — any intentions — are certain to get ground up by conflicts, memories, habits and divisions that have confounded natives, colonialists and invaders alike.
Basically, the nation builders will be working from scratch. After decades of civil war, there is no civil administration in Afghanistan, no army, just an array of warring tribes within a line the British Foreign Office drew on a map in 1903. Worse, it is located in a part of the world where any change has instant ramifications for its six unstable neighbors and beyond. That is what Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian who has been assigned by the United Nations to work on Afghanistan, warned the Security Council last week. All options are bad, he reportedly said; the challenge is to figure out which is least bad.
The danger lies not only within Afghanistan. Shock waves from the American campaign have already spread to neighboring states and beyond, with the danger that a campaign to set one place aright could undermine American efforts at nation building elsewhere.
Though virtually all the world's countries proclaimed support for the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks, the bombing campaign to pry Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan has touched an anti-American nerve across the Islamic world, potentially providing new ammunition for radical groups from Pakistan to Indonesia. In the Middle East, Arab states with potent radical Islamic movements, like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, become more anxious every day the bombing continues.
"What I worry about is based on what we're already seeing, and that is our striking in Afghanistan is a coup for Islamic extremists in Pakistan and around the world, in terms of their ability to mobilize," said Jessica Stern, a lecturer on terrorism at Harvard.
PAKISTAN'S shaky military regime has staked its survival on backing the United States, but that has meant confronting ever larger anti-American demonstrations, on which the police have opened fire several times.
At the same time, Washington's efforts to woo Pakistan set off automatic alarms in India, which promptly signaled its concern with a new round of shelling in the disputed province of Kashmir. Israel, too, has made clear its irritation with the American outreach to Arabs, while Yasir Arafat has been compelled to shoot — and kill — Palestinian demonstrators to demonstrate his fealty to Washington.
The courtship of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia could also go awry, warns Barnett Rubin, an expert on the region at New York University. "We could be getting into a lot of trouble in Central Asia," he said. A main concern, he said, was that Islam A. Karimov, the corrupt and dictatorial president of Uzbekistan, was essentially getting "a carte blanche to do what he wants — that will only intensify the opposition to him."
Yet Mr. Bush does not have the option of staying out. The attacks on Sept. 11 proved that the world and its manifold problems cannot be wished away, even if getting involved in one problem means getting involved in a whole universe of them.
In Afghanistan, the logic is starkly simple: the hunt for Mr. bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network is the overarching priority of American foreign and military policy.
Getting him requires routing the Taliban, the religious group that controls most of Afghanistan and provides Mr. bin Laden with safe harbor. And getting rid of the Taliban means putting something else in power to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to a blood-soaked breeding ground for new jihads.
Here, too, every potential solution has dangerous side effects. The Northern Alliance arrayed against the Taliban in the north is composed largely of Uzbeks and Tajiks, who ransacked Kabul the last time they took the city and are anathema to neighboring Pakistan.
The dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan are the Pashtun, but other than the Taliban, they have no organization that has any sizeable backing. None of the available leaders hold out any promise for national leadership. All are fundamentalist in religion, autocratic and stridently anti-Western, and most have fighting all their lives. As Mr. Brahimi said, they identify two options: total victory for their faction, or war, which keeps them in business.
The most popular idea floated so far is getting a tribal council together under Mohammad Zahir Shah, who reigned as king of Afghanistan for 40 years until he was deposed in 1973. The idea has a distinct ring of desperation, not least because the ex-king is 86. It has also been tried before, minus the king: in February 1989, as the Soviets were about to complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan, Afghan rebel leaders convened what they called a Supreme Council of the Islamic Elders of the Afghan Mujahedeen in Islamabad. It was the ninth and last attempt to form a coalition of the seven major factions, and within weeks, the Afghans were fighting each other, now with huge arsenals of American and Soviet arms.
"It's one of those undesirable spinoffs," Stansfield Turner, the former director of Central Intelligence, which had helped supply and train the anti-Soviet forces, told a reporter.
During the cold war, such spinoffs were perceived as an acceptable cost of keeping Communism at bay. The C.I.A. coined the term "blowback," a term now much in vogue to describe, basically, reaping what you sow. A whole rogues gallery of dictators were put in power by the C.I.A. and the Pentagon so long as they kept their country on "our" side — Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Suharto of Indonesia, Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan, Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire among many others.
Unsavory as they were, the bipolar world imposed a crude stability on the globe. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the notion of propping up useful leaders was replaced by the idea of building a world of stable democracies.
FOR Mr. Bush's opponent in the presidential contest, Al Gore, the ideal was the Marshall Plan, in which American capital and protection helped rebuild Europe from the devastation of World War II.
But that was a continent basically grounded in the same culture as the United States, which is a primary reason that some former Soviet satellites of eastern Europe are successfully being reintegrated in Europe. Elsewhere, however, attempts to intervene in local conflicts have been disappointing or worse.
Even in the Balkans, where a series of interventions ended a wave of ethnic cleansing, the future is unclear. There is no certainty, for example, that Bosnia would remain stable without the presence of Western troops, and the fate of Kosovo is far from resolved.
Elsewhere, attempts at intervention have ranged from futile to disastrous. Somalia remains ungoverned. The hopes raised by the ouster of Mobutu in Zaire, now Congo, have given way to dismay over a seemingly intractable war. In Haiti, the rule of law has fallen to its lowest point since an international military operation was mounted to restore an elected president in 1994. And that hardy perennial, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rages on.
The experience may be disheartening. But as Mr. Bush is learning, staying out does not keep it out. It may not be the role of the United States to tell the world how it should be, but the other options are even worse.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
