At 28/11/01 12:13 -0500, Doug wrote:
>[So is there any correct socialist/internationalist position on this?]
>
>Wall Street Journal - November 28, 2001
>
>Nation-Building:
>Too Important To Be Left to U.N.
>
>By David Rieff. Mr. Rieff is writing a book on humanitarian aid.
And Seth wrote:
>What is to be done? I'm not theologically opposed to foreign peacekeepers.
>America's friends in the NA are, however. If Rieff has an action plan for
>imposing peacekeepers that won't be violently rejected by the Afghans, I'd
>like to hear it.
>
>
>It should be mentioned that the UN had a chance - no guarantees, just a
>chance - to put together an Afghan proto-government based on the domestic
>anti-Taliban opposition *before* the bombing. Military action to implement
>that government could come later.
>
>
>Instead, the US/Russia decided to let the bombs fly and give the Northern
>Alliance a fait accompli, wrecking that delicate process. Now the NA have
>zero incentive to compromise; they've already seized more than their share
>of the pie.
>
>
>Seth
A couple of weeks later it is perhaps easier to answer this.
Hamid Karzai with a wife who is a gynaecologistmay be the best available in terms of the existing balance of forces.
He is probably best seen as a bourgeois national democrat who is willing to cooperate with international finance capital.
The US is probably wise to keep out of the peace keeping and the conferencing which was better hosted by Germany. Credit should be given to the fact that the inhabitants of Afghanistan have centuries if not millenia of experience of equilibrating their differences. It is striking indeed how little fighting has actually taken place, and how little revenge has been exacted.
The solution that is emerging is a sort of Macedonia solution, a NATO type protectorate with an emphasis on conflict management, bourgeois democratic rights, and aid to open the door to the domination of finance capital. In a couple of decades Afghanistan could be facing the problems that Argentina does now.
Perhaps that is progress?
A more radical internationalist perspective is to agree the importance of democratic rights and conflict resolution, but to insist that economic reconstruction must build from the bottom up, from the living labour power of the working people, out of which the communistic tribal traditions can grow into more socialist forms of cooperation. But it is about growth and fostering, rather than centralised prescription. So it is difficult to find a coherent way to resist the new domination of global finance capital. Especially if there is not a global fight against the injustice of the world capitalist system.
Chris Burford
>The decision by the Northern Alliance to send a delegation to the
>U.N.-sponsored conference on Afghanistan, which began yesterday, is being
>hailed as an enormously hopeful sign. In a fatuous demonstration of the
>triumph of hope over experience, the president of the Security Council
>called the conference -- being held in Bonn -- "an indispensable first
>step toward the establishment of a broad-based representative government
>in Afghanistan." Nothing could be further from the truth.
>
>The Northern Alliance, its control over the Afghan capital of Kabul
>secured courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, is a reluctant participant at
>best, and any commitments it makes are unlikely to be honored in practice.
>The other factions that are attending -- the Iranian-backed opposition
>known as the Cyprus group; the loyalists of the aged King Zahir; and
>Pashtun groups that either opposed their ethnic brethren in the Taliban
>regime, or at least broke with them in time to get a seat at the
>negotiating table -- are no more committed to "representative government"
>(whatever that means in the Afghan context) than the Northern Alliance.
>
>The U.N. position is that the talks are supposed to lead to a loya jirga,
>or a grand council of Afghanistan's tribal and religious elders. There
>will, of course, be nothing representative about such a meeting except in
>the sense that all traditional vested interests in Afghanistan other than
>the Taliban will be represented. In other words, like the Bonn conference,
>it will be a meeting of precisely those leaders who over the past two
>decades have brought Afghanistan to its current state of ruin and horror.
>
>Indeed, though the Taliban are now hated by the overwhelming majority of
>the Afghan people, they were initially welcomed because they were seen as
>an alternative to the groups the U.N. and the international actors now
>present as the prospective founding fathers (no mothers need apply, it
>goes without saying) of Afghan democracy. If it weren't so tragic, it
>would be almost funny.
>
>And yet it is impossible to watch this intense process of bogus
>democratization unfold without thinking that we have been here before.
>Indeed, it is hard not to fear that the U.N. effort is on the brink of
>recapitulating practically every error that world body has committed in
>its nation-building, conflict-resolution, and peacekeeping efforts from
>Somalia to Kosovo.
>
>As in Somalia, various pre-Taliban warlords -- notably Northern Alliance
>President Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Uzbek Gen. Rashid Dostam, the
>Iranian-backed Ismail Khan, and the Pashtun leader Haji Qadir, who until
>recently was an associate of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar -- believe it
>is their turn to wield power in Kabul. As in Rwanda, the great powers and
>the West seem to believe that with enough humanitarian and development
>aid, people who want to kill each other, and have for a generation, can
>somehow be reconciled. As in Kosovo, there will be no adequate commitment
>of international police to ensure even the beginnings of a society in
>which rights are respected.
>
>To say this is not to question either the justice or the necessity of the
>U.S. decision to go to war in Afghanistan. But believing that destroying
>al Qaeda and the Taliban was imperative is hardly the same thing as
>believing that anyone has a coherent plan for rebuilding Afghanistan. If
>anything, the reverse is the case. Indeed, the willingness of the U.S. to
>turn the job over to the U.N. should demonstrate where the issue really
>sits on Washington's list of priorities. For the U.N. is being used as it
>has so often been used in the past -- both as a fig leaf for the great
>powers and as a welfare agency for failed states.
>
>A serious commitment to Afghanistan, the ultimate failed state, would
>involve making the place an international protectorate. That is the only
>form of government that has the slightest hope of ameliorating the lot of
>the people of Afghanistan. But the efforts of the various U.N. officials,
>and of its two special representatives -- the former Algerian foreign
>minister, Lakhdar Brahimi, and the Spanish diplomat, Francesc Vendrell --
>have all been in the service of the illusion that no such protectorate is
>necessary.
>
>No doubt, they are making the best of a bad situation. A protectorate
>would involve not just humanitarian relief workers and international civil
>servants but massive numbers of Western troops. Yet the last thing the
>U.S. or any of the major coalition partners want is to send soldiers to
>Afghanistan. Faced with Northern Alliance displeasure, even Tony Blair's
>bellicose British government is now having second thoughts about a
>comparatively small deployment.
>
>The sad truth is that while Colin Powell is right to say that the U.S. and
>its allies have an enormous obligation "not to leave the Afghan people in
>the lurch," that is just what they are doing by pretending the Afghans
>will choose democracy if afforded some diplomatic help and a lot of money
>for rebuilding, yet politically left to their own devices. To the
>contrary, left to their own devices these Afghan leaders will simply take
>up where they left off before the Taliban overthrew them.
>
>Indeed, the only regime that would at least offer a possibility that the
>future of Afghanistan would be better than its hideous recent past would
>be an international protectorate in which the warlords had little or no
>say. For the process of democratization is going to take decades, and,
>politically incorrect though it may be to insist that this is a job only
>the West can do, it cannot be entrusted to people who wouldn't know a
>human right if they tripped over it. No amount of U.N. window-dressing,
>high-flown rhetoric, and humanitarian aid, can change this fact.