Games without Rules: The Often-Interrupted History of Afghanistan

by Tamim Ansary

With no following, no enemies, and no war crimes marring his résumé, Karzai looked like an ideal man to oversee the building of a new country utterly severed from its past.

As the Afghan delegates were making their way to Germany, US Special Forces and Northern Alliance warriors were attacking the Tora Bora cave complex near Afghanistan’s southeastern border. US forces fired incendiary devices into the caves and incinerated everyone inside, but Osama Bin Laden somehow escaped.

core al Qaeda operatives were cornered in the north, but the United States allowed Pakistan to airlift the several thousand Arabs and Pakistanis away in Pakistani airplanes before Northern Alliance forces could get to them.

Next, Karzai appointed a commission to draft a new constitution, and they completed their task by December 2003.

Campaigning was limited, because only Hamid Karzai had the resources to send his team to every part of the country. “Taliban remnants” tried to intimidate potential voters, in one hideous case ambushing a bus and killing all on board who had voting cards in their possession. Even so, more than 9 million people cast ballots on election day. It was heroic.

Parliamentary elections held a few months later were more disorderly. More fraud occurred, more violence broke out before, during, and after election day; but in the end a parliament was seated and so, by early 2005, the four-step process mapped out at Bonn had been completed, and even a moderate optimist could believe that Afghanistan was on the verge of takeoff.

In the decades of turmoil, the smartest move for any Afghan had been to trust in guns, distrust neighbors, and cluster under the protection of the nearest strongman of familiar ethnicity. The Bonn project could not succeed so long as the country remained in that state of jangled paranoia.

Peace could come only if order won.

If the Bonn process succeeded, their very strengths would become liabilities, and they might be redefined as criminals. They had every stake in preventing the new society from taking shape.

The Tokyo Conference finally decided that the reconstruction of Afghanistan would require $25 billion! Afghan leaders attending the conference didn’t push their luck; they asked for only $10 billion. Unfortunately, donor nations at the conference pledged only $3 billion. Never mind: that was still more money than anyone had dreamed possible only one year earlier, and more might yet be pledged.1

The majestic Buddhas of Bamiyan had been destroyed by the Taliban, but several Kabul University professors now proposed that one of them be reconstructed—and the other left shattered as a solemn memorial to the tragedy that had befallen Afghan culture.

Hussein proved easy to topple, but the democracy, prosperity, and happiness that were supposed to follow proved elusive.

Afghanistan would straighten out on its own, but by the end of 2003 it was coming to terms with the probability that the United States might have to do some nation building to ensure that women be liberated and empowered, that democracy take root, and that Afghanistan end up stable and prosperous.

Inevitably, many of these new security forces behaved as if their guns and badges entitled them to special privileges.

His first insight: Afghanistan mattered more than Iraq; his second, Afghanistan was not just a cleanup operation but a real shooting war; his third, the United States and its allies were losing this war; and, finally, America had to get out of this place but without letting the house catch fire on its way out,

Obama was the first US president to take official if muted note of Pakistan’s treacherous role in the Afghan drama. He also recognized the problem centered in the territory straddling the eroding border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Obama said Iraq had been a mistake, the real enemy was in Af-Pak, and he would go after this real enemy.

The general was called to Washington by his commander in chief for further instruction in military protocol, and the legendary General David Petraeus was installed in his place.

The killing of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, should have marked a turning point, given that when the United States went into Afghanistan in 2001, capturing Bin Laden and defeating al Qaeda were the avowed purpose of the war.

His domestic political rivals would have accused him of accepting a defeat. But when a small team of Navy Seals dropped into a compound in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, and shot Osama Bin Laden dead, they achieved the only definable objective of the war. Surely now it would be possible to declare victory and go home. But, as it turned out, it was too late for that. The United States was too thoroughly embroiled in Afghanistan to disengage so easily, even though the Obama plan to train an Afghan national army and police force and hand the country over to them remained on the books.

The technologies essential to power and prosperity over the next century will depend on rare earth minerals, so you can bet those minerals will be as much the basis of wealth in the near future as oil was in the recent past. And poor Afghanistan is located right on the line of scrimmage again between the many powers that will be fighting for those riches.

Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it’s intervening in “a country,” but it’s actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.

Every foreign intervention founders therefore on the same rock. Routinely, the foreign power puts a proxy on the throne and tries to govern the country through him. But the very authority given to this proxy, because it comes from foreigners, weakens his authority among the traditional forces of old Afghanistan.

The problem is not that Afghans unite and then cannot be conquered; the problem is that Afghans fragment and then cannot be governed. The great powers have a stake in making Afghanistan more governable, but the only people who can achieve this happy result are Afghans—because it depends on the resolution of contradictions within Afghan culture. Once the foreign power withdraws in disgust from a country it has helped render ungovernable, some new permutation of the Afghan urban (or rural) ruling classes comes back to power, its prestige renewed by the role it has (supposedly) played in driving out foreigners.

The country is rife with contradictions—but then so is the planet. And if Afghanistan succeeds in blending its many strains into a cohesive cultural whole, well, then, maybe there’s hope for the planet too.