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NEWS & LETTERS, October-November 2006Our Life and Timesby Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth Afghanistan crumblingFive years after the U.S. toppled the ultra-fundamentalist Taliban, Afghanistan is rapidly sliding downward. Taliban forces have regrouped and begun to vie for power in the Pashtun southeast. These forces, supported from bases in Pakistan, have assassinated hundreds of officials, aid workers, teachers, women’s activists, and Muslim clerics not in accord with the Taliban’s retrogressionist ideology. The Taliban has also destroyed some 300 schools. School enrollment, especially of girls, has declined from a high of five million (1.5 million of them girls) a couple years ago. Pakistan’s madrasas, the original spawning ground of the Taliban in the 1990s, seem to offer an inexhaustible supply of young recruits willing to engage in suicide attacks. However, neither the nefarious tactics of the Taliban, nor the support they have received from elements of Pakistan’s military-intelligence services, can alone explain their re-emergence. The Taliban is feeding on the failures of the Western-supported government of Hamid Karzai, in power since 2001. Under Karzai, corruption has reached unprecedented proportions, creating a much-resented stratum of wealthy officials. Despite $15 billion in aid from developed countries since 2001, only 6% of the population has electricity, while half suffers malnutrition. The ostensibly secular Karzai government has allowed fundamentalists to take control of the judiciary, and warlords to rule over much of the country. In many rural areas, opium cultivation has become an alternative to grinding poverty. As a result, Afghanistan now accounts for 90% of the world’s opium crop. Perhaps most important, the U.S. has lost support because of the way it has conducted the so-called war on terror. |
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