Hazara Nation

Afgha.com

“I would rather work as your servant, cut grass and tend your garden than be the
ruler of Afghanistan.”
Amir Yaqub Khan, to a British viceroy, 19th Century.

While violence in Iraq seems to be subsiding for the moment, it’s rising in our “other war” in Afghanistan. The victory over the Taliban that appeared certain six years ago is falling apart, but if we heed the lessons of Iraq, we can still prevail.

Conventional wisdom blames “foreign elements” (namely Pakistan, accused of stirring trouble by harboring Taliban insurgents), but that’s not accurate. The crux of matter is that Afghanistan suffers from Weak Government Syndrome. “He who has money in his pocket has power in his arms;” or so goes the old
Persian saying. Afghanistan lacks both. It doesn’t have sufficient skilled human and natural resources to generate enough revenue to maintain a functional government or attend to the basic needs of its citizens. The result is lawlessness, ethnic rivalries, rampant corruption and the fear of total collapse, causing paralysis at all levels of pubic and private life.

How can an enduring peace be established in this country? Throwing money at the problem is not a long-term solution. We must strike at the heart of the crisis. As a native of Afghanistan, I suggest the following:

A NEW FEDERATION: Afghanistan’s centralized government tries to micro-manage the economy and appoints civil servants from Kabul, top to bottom. This Soviet-style system, a remnant of the Communist era, has never worked. Economic progress stalls while officials wait for orders from Kabul bureaucrats. This central command is out of touch with the ethnic structure of the country.

In many ways, Afghanistan shares the ethnic structure of Iraq, where Sunni, Shia and Kurds hold sway in separate regions. In Afghanistan, Pashtuns have dominated the south and east, Tajiks live in the north and Hazara in central Afghanistan. While Afghanistan hasn’t been torn by the level of sectarian violence seen in
Iraq, the Pashtuns complain that the Tajiks have overrun Parliament and the Karzai government, and the Tajiks accuse the Pashtuns of harboring the Taliban to assert their hegemony.

As the Karzai government weakens, ethnic tensions mount, evidenced by the Nov. 7 suicide bombing in the once-calm northern city of Baghlan, killing 73 people including six members of Parliament. I am not suggesting that we should divide the country into ethnic states, but giving a certain level of autonomy to regions would help reduce ethnic tension and also cut the Gordon Knot that has locked economic activity since this country’s inception two centuries ago.

In Iraq, we overthrew the Saddam Hussein tyranny and are hoping that Sunni, Shia and Kurds can run their own affairs in a loose central government. We could do the same in Afghanistan by allocating power to locals while still keeping the country together with a single currency, defense and Parliament. This decentralization
might save the country from falling to extremists.

REACH OUT TO LOCALS: In 1996, a handful of Taliban delegates visited San Diego in an attempt to solicit political support from the Afghan Diaspora, and they met with my father, who had worked most of his adult life as a representative of the Afghan government in local districts. ”Do you guys have the support of locals?”
my father asked them. “If not, forget about us.”

My father, who died in San Diego three years later, knew that without the cooperation of the public, progress was nearly impossible in Afghanistan’s semi-feudal society. “Build trust,” he would say when asked how he was able to build bridges, schools and roads that still bear his name in Badakhshan and Hazarajat. “Once you build trust, people obey you.”

The U.S. is not wholly responsible for the misery in Afghanistan . The attacks of 9/11 led to U.S involvement, but after the Taliban appeared routed, the U.S. made unrealistic promises to Afghans, then left the job half-done by going into Iraq. Today, Afghans seem to have lost trust in the U.S and their own government.
One way to regain that lost trust is to apply the lessons of Iraq. “We got down at the people level and are staying," U.S. Gen. David Petraeus said. "Once the people know we are going to be around, then all kinds of things start to happen." We have to reach out to the religious students and lure them from Al Qaeda to our side. If we can create positive dialogue with the former Saddam Baathists in Faluja, we should do the same with the moderate Taliban. Appealing to their nationalism, we should be able to separate them from the Arab extremists.

SURGE: Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s repeated appeals to NATO and the U.S. for a military surge has fallen on deaf ears. Today, 53,000 coalition forces are no match for the revived insurgency. The Afghan government is frayed and tattered. NATO has been reluctant to become engaged in a ground operation, much less provide more troops, and its members are squabbling about burden-sharing “Our European partners are dropping the ball,” Hans Binnendigik wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Europeans want to win hearts and minds by being engaged in humanitarian missions. This is a good intention, but without a big stick and the will to use it, good intentions could be famous last words. This fissure in NATO is playing into the hands of the insurgents. If the Taliban takes over, Europe will be inundated not only with opium and terrorism, but also
the flow of refugees.

If we do nothing, President Karzai may echo the sentiments of Amir Yaqub Khan, who said he’d rather be a servant cutting grass than ruler of Afghanistan. Karzai might already be wishing he’d never left the restaurant business in Chicago.

Wahab Ghafar Raofi is a former public prosecutor for the Ministry of Justice in Kabul. He is now a resident of Irvine, California. and a Consultant for SMC Consulting. The opinions expressed are his own and do not reflect the opinions of SMC Consulting.