Afghanistan: Back from the Brink?

BBC ^ | 9/2/09

[nickcarraway]

Afghanistan has made strides in many spheres over the past eight years despite its problems, writes the BBC's M Ilyas Khan after a recent journey through the country to cover elections.

From the Communist takeover of 1978 to the destruction of Kabul in 1992 and its subsequent fall to the Taliban in 1996, Afghanistan has been back from the brink many times before.

There is no reason why it should be different this time. I was in Kabul in March 2001 when the Taliban blew up the two 2nd Century Buddha statues carved into a mountainside in central Bamyan province.

I remember the gloom, and even despair, it caused among some of the Taliban's own mid-ranking officials. I thought things had slid past the point of no return. But then came hope, disguised as an ostensibly unpopular decision of the United States to attack the country and expel the Taliban.

Flicker of hope

The move promised democracy, economic uplift and an end to war, objectives which the Afghans largely supported. I saw a flicker of that hope in June 2002 when delegates of the emergency Loya Jirga, or the grand tribal assembly, gathered in Kabul and endorsed Hamid Karzai as the interim leader of the post-Taliban Afghanistan. Mr Karzai's subsequent success in the 2004 presidential elections showed that the Afghan people saw him as a unifying figure and not simply an "American stooge" as he was branded by some elements in neighbouring Pakistan.

I remember the tribes in eastern Afghanistan raising armed volunteers to prevent Taliban insurgents, based in sanctuaries in the Pakistani border areas, from disrupting the elections.

[marron]

Good article.

The progress described there was bought with a lot of American and Afghan blood. We mustn’t even think of handing it back to the Talibs.

This is the kind of country where you will always have some kind of gendarmerie out chasing bandits; it is the nature of things that there will be an endless supply of bandits and ignorant, deluded souls with nothing to live for coming down out of the hills to murder and rob. Afghans will always have to fight them off to have a normal life; for them fighting bandits will be their normal.