Gwynne Dyer: US leaves wrecked Afghanistan to thugs, murderers

This is not democracy. This is a rubber stamp," said Sima Samar, the Minister for Women's Affairs in the interim Afghan Government.

Looking around the enormous tent erected in the grounds of the wrecked Kabul Polytechnic to house the 2000 delegates to the Loya Jirga, the grand council called to choose a government until elections are held late next year, she continued: "Everything here has already been decided by those with the power. This Jirga includes all the warlords. None of them is left out."

She was not exaggerating. There they were in the first and second rows: a roll-call of the thugs and murderers who have ruined Afghanistan.

They were there because the United States, at the moment the real ruler of Afghanistan, wanted them to be there. Washington wants a cheap one-way ticket out of Afghanistan, and they are it.

When the Taleban regime was overthrown late last year by an alliance of American air power and these same warlords, the US had a choice: to stay and help to build a new Afghanistan, or just to hand over to its warlord allies and get out fast.

The British and Russians will both tell you that foreign armies who stay too long in Afghanistan always end up regretting it. Besides, the Bush Administration doesn't do "nation-building", so the decision was a no-brainer.

Since President Bush has little else to show for his Afghan expedition - no Osama bin Laden dead or alive, not even Mullah Omar in chains - he needs to show the American public that something positive has been accomplished, so "democracy" has to come to Afghanistan.

But not real democracy, because that would take years of effort and billions of dollars of development funds, and even then it might not work. Just a show of democracy, and then out within a year or less.

That is why Isaf, the International Security Assistance Force to which 19 nations have contributed troops, has never expanded outside Kabul.

Nobody wanted to take on the big job of policing the rest of the country even long enough to ensure that the Loya Jirga could be chosen freely.

What happened instead was documented in a recent report from Human Rights Watch that was based on a survey of the delegate-selection process in six southern provinces. Intimidation was rife, beatings and false arrests were frequent, and the province usually wound up being represented by the friendly neighbourhood warlord and his men.

Meanwhile, the highway banditry and illegal road tolls that were suppressed in Taleban times are reappearing everywhere. The poppy crop that the Taleban successfully banned (Afghanistan used to supply 75 per cent of the world's opium) has been replanted, and interim president Hamid Karzai's Government is too weak to enforce the law against poppy farmers with warlord backing.

Humanitarian aid must now be funnelled through the hands of the local mafiosi in half the provinces of Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was not better off under the Taleban, but it was not a whole lot worse off. To which Americans might reply: too bad, but we didn't really go there to improve life for you Afghans.

If that happens, we're pleased, but we went there to root out a terrorist group that inflicted a great hurt on the US, and was given shelter by the Taleban regime.

We destroyed it, and now it's up to you Afghans to pick up the pieces if you can. Bye.

Fair enough, if this were the first contact between the US and Afghanistan, and if the Afghans were really an incorrigibly tribal people who have spent their entire history in a low-grade civil war. But neither of those things is true.

Afghan leaders have been trying to modernise their country for almost a century now, and after the monarchy was overthrown in 1973 the new, pro-Soviet regime put the project into high gear.

Twenty years ago, there was barely a head-scarf to be seen in Kabul, let alone a burqa. The grounds of Kabul Polytechnic, now thronged with the bearded retinues of tribal warlords, were filled with young Afghan women in jeans studying for engineering degrees.

The conservative tribal areas hated modernisation, but what turned it into a 22-year civil war was former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's insight that if he secretly armed the tribes against Kabul, he could sucker the Soviet Union into coming to the Kabul Government's rescue.

The Russians duly "invaded" in 1979, the US ran even more arms in to the tribes, and Kissinger got what he wanted: Russia's Vietnam.

Afghanistan's modern infrastructure was destroyed and millions of Afghans were killed or driven into exile, but after 10 years the Russians pulled out.

Kissinger boasts that it helped to bring down the Soviet Union, which is rather like the butterfly in Kipling's Just So Stories which stamped - and felt responsible because King Solomon's temple then collapsed.

Having helped to wreck Afghanistan, Washington then walked away, abandoning it to a long civil war and the tender mercies of Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (which eventually pacified it, more or less, by creating the Taleban).

Now the US is walking away again, behind a flimsy facade of "democratisation". But given the dismal record of past interventions, British, Russian, American and Pakistani, maybe this is the least bad outcome to a miserable episode in Afghan history.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.

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