Home >> South Asia >> Afghanistan

     Email   Print 

Afghanistan: The Rats Abandon the Sinking Ship

Nasir Shansab - 3/30/2008

What I saw on a visit to Afghanistan in February 2008, combined with the decisions some of the coalition countries have made, convinced me that Afghanistan ’s gradual slide towards mayhem has accelerated. This is what I mean:

The Norwegian government announced that it would close its embassy in Kabul , the first coalition government to do so. Such embassy closures bring to mind the gradual embassy closings of the 1980s during the war of resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, leading to the complete abandonment of that country and the emergence of the Taliban in the mid 1990s.

In a compromise with its opposition, the Canadian government set a deadline for its military presence in Afghanistan.

Citing Taliban penetration of the northern province of Kunduz where a small Swiss military detachment had been operating, Switzerland terminated its limited but symbolically important military presence in Afghanistan .

During my stay in Kabul, I realized that most hotels and restaurants were virtually empty. On one chilly February day, a guest at the five-star Serena Hotel counted nine patrons. At lunchtime on the same day, the restaurant at the Intercontinental was as empty as the parking lot outside. Serena has closed one of its two restaurants and the solitude at the second is overwhelming.

On yet another day in February of this year, a number of forty-something Afghan-Americans, Afghan- Australians, and Afghan-Europeans, clad in blue jeans and fashionable brand-name sweaters, had come together to spend a cheerful evening in an increasingly dreary city. Sitting in a semicircle before the fireplace and listening to the blissfully crackling of fire, the men and women sipped on their drinks and reminisced of times past. When the talk turned to the future, the light conversation came to an abrupt halt and the brief, sorrow-free moment became sullen. The assembled men and women nervously knocked back their drinks of Johnny Walker scotch and Absolut vodka—products that awhile before had been readily available at standard prices but had now become black-market goods available only under threat of prosecution and at exorbitant cost. Leaving behind good jobs and comfortable lives in the countries these Diaspora Afghans grew up, they had rushed into the mysterious promise of devastated Afghanistan . They wanted to make money; they also wished to help their poverty-stricken people with whom they identified and for whom they unexpectedly felt a great deal of compassion. Now, after several years of collecting large salaries and having been spoiled by being attended to by servants, the money and convenience were no longer enough. The Afghan government’s astounding incompetence, the regime’s disrespect for and disregard of the law, and the endemic corruption holding the country in its suffocating grip, had caused them to think seriously about quitting. To their amazement, they found unanimity in their feeling that they would be out of this country by 2009.

The first serious, organized, and deliberate expression of resentment happened in the same chilly month of February 2008. A group of men, with vastly different life experiences than those forty-something in Kabul , assembled in Kandahar , President Karzai’s hometown, to discuss the rapidly collapsing order around them. Twenty-seven bearded tribal elders, representing 120 tribes drafted a manifesto, which—according to Afghan News, a foreign-based News organization—among other things proclaimed, “The problems now are so great, it’s impossible for the government to control them. The people need to stand up.”