TIME: Losing the
Peace?
Monday, July 15, 2002
By MICHAEL ELLIOTT with MICHAEL WARE / KABUL
The Afghan province of Uruzgan, north of Kandahar, is
brutal territory. Its villages have been racked by
decades of war, and the summer heat can reach an
inhospitable 120[degrees]. A few weeks ago, Abdul
Rahim, a local chieftain in Uruzgan's Deh Rawod
district, reclined on a pillow in the shade of a
thatch awning and spoke of what it would take to
bring hope to this blighted land. It's a simple list,
really: a few roads, schools and hospitals.
"Rebuilding this country is the way to deny it to
al-Qaeda," he told TIME.
But Afghanistan won't be an easy place to set right.
In large pockets of the country, military action
continues unabated, with all its attendant risks. An
American AC-130 gunship last week apparently raked a
wedding celebration in the Deh Rawod village of
Kakarak, about 70 miles north of Kandahar. Afghan
authorities say more than 40 people were killed.
President Bush called Afghan President Hamid Karzai
to express his sympathy for those who lost loved
ones, and the two leaders committed themselves to a
full investigation of the tragedy. But the deaths
prompted the first anti-American demonstration in
Kabul, the Afghan capital, since the fall of the
Taliban. A few days later, Haji Abdul Qadir, a Deputy
President in Karzai's government, was killed in his
car outside the Ministry of Public Works. Two gunmen,
who had been hiding in bushes by the driveway,
riddled the car with bullets. Qadir was one of the
leading figures of Afghanistan's majority Pashtun
community, and his death deals a grievous blow to the
stability of Karzai's team.
The Kakarak incident remains something of a mystery.
American investigators found no bodies among the
debris, though locals insist that's because the dead
were buried quickly, in accordance with local custom.
The Afghans blame the Americans for overreacting to
celebratory shooting at the wedding; the Americans
maintain that the AC-130 was responding to enemy
fire.
There are, no doubt, plenty of people in Uruzgan who
wish the Americans ill. Pentagon sources contend that
in the past month American forces have been directly
fired upon three times by Afghans who later claimed
they had been "celebrating." Around Deh Rawod, says
Marine Lieut. General Gregory Newbold, director of
operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "there is
enormous sympathy for the Taliban and al-Qaeda."
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, was raised
in the region, as were two of his top lieutenants,
Mullah Dadullah and Mullah Bradar. All three are
still at large. The Kabul government controls the
area in name only, and few humanitarian groups have
ventured into the hot, dusty hills. For weeks, small
teams of American special forces have been operating
around Deh Rawod, searching for the hard-core Taliban
fighters who headed there at the end of last year.
At around 2 a.m. on July 1, an allied ground force of
300 to 400 troops, together with air support, was
engaged in a series of operations throughout the Deh
Rawod region. A B-52 bomber pounded a cave and tunnel
complex; special forces on the ground discovered a
weapons cache with thousands of rounds of
armor-piercing ammunition. Allied sources in
Afghanistan say that ground forces saw a mortar being
covered with a tarpaulin in Kakarak and that later
they were fired upon as they approached the village.
At that point the soldiers called in support from the
AC-130. (That night the gunship attacked no fewer
than six sites.) American sources claim--and Afghan
sources deny--that the plane was targeted by
antiaircraft fire from inside the compound where a
wedding celebration was under way. "Personnel on the
AC-130 felt that the weapons were tracking them,"
said Colonel Roger King, a Pentagon spokesman at
Bagram air base, north of Kabul. So the gunship--a
flying arsenal loaded with machine guns and a 105-mm
howitzer--fired on the compound. Subsequent comments
by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did little
to soften the blow. "There cannot be the use of that
kind of firepower and not have mistakes," he said.
"It is going to happen."
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Kakarak, the
episode reveals just how tricky the war in
Afghanistan has become. The U.S. may have won, in the
accepted sense of the word, but the enemy hasn't
surrendered. Since the battle of Shah-i-Kot in March,
al-Qaeda and Taliban forces have split into smaller
and smaller groups, which survive by mixing with
civilian populations. That's exactly what a big,
heavily armed superpower with a taste for making war
from the air doesn't want; it makes the chance of
accidents like Kakarak much more likely.
Such dramas add to a sense that the U.S. may be
losing the battle for the hearts and minds of
Afghans. That's especially true in the south, where
most of the American military action is now
concentrated and where U.S. propaganda has to contend
with an overheated rumor mill in the teahouses and
bazaars. Inevitably, Karzai is linked to America's
mistakes. "In the eyes of ordinary Afghans," says a
senior U.N. official, "this government's fate is
intertwined with the American performance." Afghan
exile Hamid, a Pashtun now in Quetta, Pakistan, says
of Karzai, "He is nothing. Just the son of George W.
Bush." Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), remarks, "There's
a sense down there, rightly or wrongly, of an
occupied country."
Many of the south's majority Pashtun believe that
Karzai's government is dominated by Panjshiri Tajiks
who fought in the Northern Alliance alongside the
Americans--though Karzai is Pashtun. About 1.1
million Afghan refugees have flooded back into the
country since the beginning of the year--many more
than aid agencies had predicted--but according to
unhcr registries, less than a third of them have
resettled in the Pashtun provinces, suggesting most
Pashtun exiles are staying away.
The murder of Qadir, a Pashtun leader, will do
nothing to soothe those fears. In a statement after
his death, the U.S. State Department called him a
"key leader in efforts to promote national
reconciliation." American officials are anxious to
avoid giving the impression that the situation in
Afghanistan is deteriorating beyond repair, though a
State Department official concedes, "Overall, it's
still dangerous."
Beyond that, officials in Kabul affiliated with the
U.N. and other aid organizations are now worried that
America's obsession with the dangers of Afghanistan
and its single-minded pursuit of military objectives
may even be making things worse. A few wells have
been dug, some schools and health clinics have been
repaired, but outside Kabul the expected flows of aid
have not yet improved the lives of ordinary Afghans.
Most remember that the Soviets enjoyed a honeymoon
after they invaded the country in 1979. Soon enough,
the locals turned against them.
"The window wasn't open for long," says an
expatriate, back in Afghanistan for the first time
since the 1980s, as he sits in a Kabul cafe. "And the
Russians hadn't bombed wedding parties."
--With
reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark
Thompson/Washington