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\title{Aftermath for Afghanistan}
\date{14 March 2002}
\author{Terry Clancy}
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\textbf{Since the 1970’s Afghanistan has been shredded by bloody conflict between rival gangs of rulers and the regional and global imperialisms which subsidise them. The infrastructure of the society ruined, lives and bodies maimed, millions forced over the border into miserable refugee camps and hundreds of thousands of people cut down by hunger or high explosive.}
In this Afghanistan is unfortunately far from unique. The same is true today of the Congo, the Horn of Africa, Angola, and many other places. There were few countries not ravaged by the hand of destructive warfare in the century just passed. No “tribal savagery” of a “warrior race” makes Afghanistan unique.
It is quite possible that Afghanistan will soon again be held on the rack of competing hierarchies.
It is certain that in the future other lands will be.
\section{The Defeat of the Taliban}
The most surprising thing about the fall of the Taliban was the extent to which many people found it surprising. There was a close link between Taliban military successes and the considerable support they received from the ruling elite of Pakistan. Starved of that, even without American bombing they would have crumbled albeit somewhat later.
As it was no tin pot rag bag force could withstand the mailed fist of a superpower. There’s nothing novel about that either, the machine guns and artillery of the late 19Th. Centaury Empires rarely met defeat from the spears of the natives and this is just the modern day equivalent.\footnote{Of course the prospects of a guerrilla force, with outside support, would be different entirely. But this was not the case in this conflict and thus any analogies with say, Afghanistan in the 1980’s would not be applicable.}
One eyewitness relates “Vast craters dotted their defensive lines, while the village of Karabah which housed their headquarters looked like it had been blow-torched from above. Mud buildings are flattened and trees reduced to eerie twisted stumps, the result of repeated B-52 strikes on one day, when I saw bombers come in every five minutes to blast the same area with their sticks of bombs.”\footnote{The Spectator 17 November 2001.}
\section{Imperialist Rivalry}
Over the years the Afghan wars have been fuelled by the USSR on the one hand and the U.S.A. on the other and then with Iran, India and Russia backing up the Northern Alliance while Pakistan did the same for the Taliban.
The conflicting interests of rival imperialisms are still at play in Afghanistan.
This is addressed in the accompanying article(Empire in Central Asia), but for now I’ll look at how this is affecting the internal situation in Afghanistan.
With Marines on the ground and B52’s in the sky the American influence is apparent and in a development without precedent the U.S. now has bases in what was formerly territory of the “Soviet” Union, to the north of Afghanistan.
The new Afghan government consists of two halves, one the Northern Alliance, and the other the Rome group, which is to say formerly exiled monarchist figures close to Zahir Shah, the deposed King.
The monarchist faction is dependant on U.S. support, being as unlike any of the splinters forming the Northern Alliance, it doesn’t have an Army and didn’t play any real role in the overthrow of the Taliban.
The King, despite, or perhaps because, he hasn’t been involved in the country for thirty years, is a genuinely popular figure.
Of late the U.S. military have been openly supporting various sides in warlord disputes.
Herat in the east is the fiefdom of Ismael Khan, a Mujaheddin warlord deposed by the Taliban and recently reinstalled with a considerable Iranian subsidy.
Gulbuddin Hikmetyar another Mujaheddin warlord, who has been promising jihad on the infidels since the September is being kept on a leash in Iran itself. He has recently offered to leave Iran if that would help ease tensions between it’s government and that of the U.S., but given that his intended destination is Afghanistan perhaps the world could do without his help.
While the Hazari militias of the Hizb-i Wahdat have long had a relationship with Iran, this must be somewhat strained at the moment as allegations are surfacing that Khan is supply Iranian arms to General Dostum, their rival for control of Mazar-e-Sharif.
On the 18\textsuperscript{th} of January Associated Press reported that:
\begin{quote}
“U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad stopped short of directly accusing Iran of interference but cited unspecified reports that Afghan fighters and money were being sent from Iran into the extremely volatile country to build opposition to Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.”
\end{quote}
And that: