Then again, though, there is no success like failure, as failure provides a pretext for entrenchment of the presence of colonizers:
***** washingtonpost.com
Wishful Thinking on Afghanistan
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, November 25, 2002; Page A15
Major General Akin Zorlu, commander of the international peacekeepers in Afghanistan, is not a swashbuckling, charge-right-at-'em sort. He speaks steadily, fingering a pen with elegant gold trimmings; his spectacles give him a studious appearance. If you ask him about U.S. policy, he's politely diplomatic. But if you listen between the lines of his pronouncements, you get a different message.
The message is that Pentagon and NATO strategy is hopelessly wishful. At the Prague summit last Thursday, NATO's leaders declared that "responsibility for providing security and law and order throughout Afghanistan resides with the Afghans themselves."
Which Afghans, precisely, are supposed to play this role?
Perhaps NATO's leaders were alluding to Afghan police forces. Here's Zorlu's description of that option. "If you visit any police station you see that they have 50 police officers or soldiers but only two very primitive guns and two bicycles. No radio assets, no vehicles, nothing.
"In Afghanistan, everywhere is full of weapons -- ammunition, mines, explosive materials, missiles, rockets," Zorlu continues, before telling about how people show up outside his headquarters offering to sell missiles by the truckload. What's more, the police officers you find in those police stations aren't necessarily doing police work. Many haven't been paid, even though their salaries amount to $24 monthly. This has two consequences. "First, they do not work," Zorlu says. "Second, they do work their own businesses by using their guns to rob the people to feed their families."
So much for Afghanistan's police providing law and order.
Okay, so perhaps NATO's leaders were looking to the Afghan army to guarantee security. In that case, which army? Afghanistan has dozens of armies, each answerable to its own warlord; the warlords promote security sometimes and other times mayhem. Right, so what about the national army? The one answerable to Hamid Karzai, the good-guy president?
The Pentagon has spent much of the past year deflecting calls for expanded peacekeeping by promising to train an Afghan national army. Training has duly begun.
But it's a painfully slow process. So far between 2,000 and 3,000 troops have passed through training, a miniscule number in a country of 22 million where most males have access to weapons. What's more, simply training people turns out to be less than totally effective. The first battalion to complete training was 600-strong at the outset. Now, says Zorlu, it's down to 300.
Where did the rest go? Well, they had been recruited from all of Afghanistan's provinces because they were supposed to form the nucleus of a truly national army. But this meant that they harbored loyalties to their local warlords. A few months of training failed to conjure up a new sense of fealty to the central government. And so, once the training was completed, many returned to serve the warlords in their home regions. Some continue to report to barracks, Zorlu acknowledges. But only on payday.
The truth is that Afghanistan doesn't have an army that can create security, any more than it has a working police force. What's more, there's no prospect of creating an effective army in a short period. As Zorlu's story of defections illustrates, you can't build national armies in a vacuum. You must bring about a sense of national identity. You must demobilize provincial armies and so eliminate rival military employers....
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34770-2002Nov24.html> *****
A colonial army of occupation, however, can't directly bring about "a sense of national identity" and build "a legitimate state" by training sepoys, be they several thousands or even several hundreds of thousands (though it's clear that the occupier in this case is not interested in shelling out enough bucks to train hundreds of thousands). A national identity of Afghans has to be built by Afghans themselves. If the history of colonialism is any indication, the occupier will only indirectly inspire a sense of national identity among the occupied by eventually becoming the enemy of most classes and sectors of the occupied territory. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>