Erik Moberg ©:
The intervening Western countries not
only toppled the Taliban regime but after that they also initiated efforts to turn
Afghanistan into a democracy. For describing these efforts, and the problems
associated with them, the time since 2001 may be divided in two periods. In the
first one, until 2014, Hamid Karzai was
president, and in the second one, after elections in 2014 Ashraf Ghani has been president. During both
periods parliamentary elections have also been held and here, as well as in
various presidential matters, different kinds of corruption have been rampant.
Starting with the first period Hamid Karzai was
appointed president in 2002 and after that he was elected in 2004 and reelected
in 2009. In the 2014 election he could however not take part since the
constitution prescribed a maximum of two periods for the same president. Anyway
the Karzai years from 2002 to 2014 were turbulent and
unstable. The president himself was capricious, unpredictable and
anti-American, and he also fostered relations with India rather than with the
neighbor Pakistan. This latter attitude was a problem since dealing with the
Taliban required dealing with Pakistan.
Going then to the second period Ashraf Ghani is a
very different kind of person. He is a technocrat with a background in the
World Bank, he is pro-American and pro-Pakistan. But still serious problems
remain. The election which made him president was, by his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah,
considered unfair and massively rigged. The conflict was however, at least
temporarily, settled by a compromise suggested by the mediating US secretary of
state John Kerry. According to this compromise Ghani
remained president while Abdullah became what was called “chief executive”, or,
in fact, prime minister. The compromise is however fragile, one of the reasons
being that Ghani and Abdullah come from different
ethnical groups in Afghanistan.
The main problem in Afghanistan is to
get rid of the Taliban insurgencies, either by fighting and defeating the
Taliban, or by reaching some sort of peace agreement. For starting with the
military activities we remember that after the ousting of the Taliban regime in
2001 very considerable foreign ground troops, mainly from the US but also from
other countries, were stationed in the country. In 2011 the number of foreign
troops peaked and amounted to 140 000, over two thirds of them American. After
that, and both because of president Karzai’s dislike of the Americans and president Barack
Obama’s ambition to reduce US forces abroad, these forces were however
substantially reduced. At the end of 2014 only 12 000 remained. And in
addition to this they also got more circumvented tasks such as training Afghan
soldiers rather than fighting. The idea was to make Afghan troops take over
more and more of the fighting.
This has however failed. The Taliban
have attacked more intensively and more successfully than since long. Not since
2001 have the Taliban held as much territory as today, that
is in the beginning of 2018. There are also signs that the Islamic State, IS,
is operating in the country (more information about IS will be presented
below). It is true that president Ghani has tried to
negotiate with not only Pakistan, whose territory is
used by the Taliban, but also with the Taliban themselves. So far these
diplomatic efforts have however not given any substantial results. Rather an
intensive civil war is going on without showing any signs of ending. Ghani has however been successful in his efforts to make
Obama keep some more US troops somewhat longer in Afghanistan. It should also
be noted that Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 by a small group of Americans
in his secret dwelling in Pakistan.
When campaigning for the presidency
Donald Trump favored a complete US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Soon however,
and influenced by his advisors and the US military commanders in Afghanistan,
he changed his mind. Now, with a beginning at the end of 2017, US is increasing
its number of troops–there are now about 14 000. Furthermore the
activities of the air force, and of the military advisors, are considerably less
restricted than before. US airplanes thus attack, among others, Taliban drug
labs, which is important since the selling of drugs (heroine) gives the Taliban
most of their incomes. And US military advisers now also directly take part in
the fighting on the ground. Whether these increased US military activities–marginal
in spite of the changed policy–will give any results in the long run remains to
be seen. The situation in Afghanistan is still chaotic.
After all of this we can now take a
closer look at the figures for the asylum seekers from Afghanistan in the table
shown in the first post dated February 1. At first we see that, although the
lowest figure occurs in 2008 and the highest in 2015, there is no continuous
movement upwards. Rather the pattern is somewhat irregular with movements both
up and down and this, I think, reflects the fact that the country all the time
has been a failed state. What is clear, however, is that the figure for 2014 is
considerably higher than for any year before that, and then, in 2015, the
growth from 42 735 to 196 205 is a veritable explosion. And then, in
2016, even if the figure is slightly lower than in 2015, it is still extremely
high and much higher than in 2014.This,
in all likelihood, is a result of the escalating civil war between the Taliban
and the Western supported regime of Afghanistan.
After this brief description of the
events since 2001 we may now return to the question about the basic causes
behind the stream of refugees from Afghanistan. Here are a few tentative
suggestions:
1.
If the Western troops had not intervened in
Afghanistan at all in 2001 the Taliban regime had not been toppled and there
would not have been any great refugee stream at all.
2.
If the US, in 2001, had limited its efforts to
targeting Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda’s activities, and thus left the
Afghan society at large untouched, there would, again, not have been any great
refugee stream.
3.
If the Western powers in 2001 had acted
exactly as they did, but found or settled for another man than Hamid Karzai, then, perhaps, a
better and more effective non-Taliban regime could have started working
immediately and got better results than those which in fact materialized.
4.
If everything had been exactly as it was, but
the Western powers had avoided reducing the number and activities of their
troops, things may perhaps have turned out better.
This leaves us with a main hypothesis,
namely that the mass emigration basically is an effect of two US actions,
namely, first, George W. Bush’s invasion, and, second, Barack Obama’s troop
withdrawal. Or, for describing the pattern somewhat differently: At first,
although the most important aim was to find a single man, Osama bin Laden, and
to destroy his, that is al-Qaeda’s training camps, a much larger operation with
much broader aims was undertaken. The regime was toppled and ineffective
efforts to install a democratic system were undertaken. And then finally, on
Barack Obama’s initiative, most of the troops were taken back, prematurely in
all likelihood, leaving Afghanistan in a civil war causing mass emigration. Whether
Donald Trump’s efforts to reverse marginally Obama’s large scale withdrawal
will change anything in the long run remains to be seen.
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