Cold War Is Over, But Hot War Drags On

Last week marked the 18th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. On Dec. 27, 1979, a local civil war in a remote highland country was transformed into the last great contest of the Cold War. When Soviet troops withdrew, in February 1989, much of Afghanistan had been destroyed; millions of Afghans had fled, and civilian deaths were too high to count. By then, the war’s major protagonists had also departed: Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Pakistan’s Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, who secured his own tenure by crafting an alliance with the United States and Saudi Arabia against the Soviets, were no longer relevant to Afghanistan’s future. For the war’s most enthusiastic purveyors, Afghanistan was over.

But war in Afghanistan continues to this day. This anniversary will be barely noticed in the Afghan highlands, where this month’s military blockade brought the isolated Hazarajat region close to famine; or in Kabul, where last week’s nearby battles among competing military factions threaten the safety of a capital city now nearly destroyed; or in Mazar-i-Sharif, where warring factions have left some of central Asia’s oldest, pluralistic societies scarred by the mass graves of recent fighting.

Today’s war is about the detritus of war. It is about the aggressive acquisitiveness of Afghanistan’s neighbors, for whom Afghanistan holds the prospect of transit lines for central Asia’s natural gas. It is about small local militias seeking short-term alliances to see them through the long winter. It is about competing commitments to religious doctrine and political beliefs, all tied to the vagaries of military power.

Today’s war is also about the many problems that plagued Afghanistan before its conflicts became the world’s war: the dilemmas of an agrarian society that had begun to loosen the tightly woven fabric of tribal loyalties; about conflicts over scarce resources and opportunities and, perhaps above all, about the nature of Afghanistan’s government and state as it moved from monarchy to republic, from local sovereignties to the unexplored and occasionally murky territory that defines a central state. These were, and are, Afghanistan’s agenda for the future.

But its current agenda is about the ways war defines life: the absence of heat and potable water; the recurrence of communicable diseases long conquered elsewhere, and the pernicious effects of millions of land mines scattered across the Afghan landscape. It is about the loss of a land to the ravages of battle, but also to a divisiveness that despoils the country Paula R. Newberg is a senior associate at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

as controlling factions impose their ways on people whose consent is neither sought nor sanctioned. For however alarming Afghanistan’s humanitarian challenges continue to be, its political agenda--the civility of local relationships in the vacuum left by absent political parties and parliaments--is the most daunting.

Afghanistan has been largely without government since 1992--when the communist-leaning government of Najibullah was overthrown by a weak, temporary coalition of moujahedeen, whose subsequent rule was erratic and short-lived. The Taliban movement that now rules the southern two-thirds of the country has imposed a semblance of order defined by edicts and social prohibitions, but its first concern is military conquest; its opponents in the north, whose directives are less frequent, are also consumed by military expediency.

Military might and empty political space have immediate consequences. Whatever money is available to fighting factions is devoted to war: Afghanistan’s sole means of systematic relief and rehabilitation is foreign assistance. The ingenuity of a few traders, and the mobility of refugees who work in neighboring countries, cannot provide enough resources to rebuild a war-torn country. Without a legitimized government, it is hard to discover and understand citizen opinions and priorities; without a legitimized government, it is difficult to understand the rules, and conflicting responses to them, that now define the public environment for Afghan citizens.

Most noticeably, the absence of public voice has meant that Afghan citizens--particularly women living under Taliban rule--have been caught between local dictate and the international standards that accompany the provision of international assistance. International aid brings with it the world’s assumptions about what constitutes the proper treatment of women, respect for human rights, notions of social equity--standards that offer a vision of a better life, but also a consistency of purpose that often eludes the complexities of war.

Overseas observers tend to dramatize the problems Afghan women face by drawing attention to the mandatory burka that drapes them in public. This curtain obscures the concrete deprivations that accompany segregation: restrictions on the use of public transport, prohibitions against working and attending school, the lack of access to medical facilities in the absence of female doctors--all remove women from services they and their families need to survive.

Universal-sounding dictates, however, do not have universal effects. Strictures that constrain urban women do not always affect rural areas similarly, and even rural Afghanistan offers a variegated window on the intersection of former opportunities and future possibilities. This diversity does not lessen the dangers of discrimination, but underscores them: It seems almost impossibly difficult to build a road through the thicket of cultural practices, ideological contest and international law that is wide enough for Afghan women to traverse.

It is for this reason that U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright’s journey last month to a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan near the Afghan border, offered significance without adequate substance. Albright told schoolgirls their futures depend on precisely the opportunities not available to them in Afghanistan, but she offered no guidance for opening schools in Kabul or returning educated women to work. By her silence, Albright reaffirmed what every Afghan woman already knows: that today’s war has become--through no fault of their own--a contest about the future for Afghanistan’s women and by extension, the durability of its heterogeneous society.

Albright left other truisms unspoken as well: that no peace is durable without the consent of Afghan citizens, and that the path to peace is obstructed by fighting factions fueled by outsiders whose stake in war has overwhelmed Afghanistan’s stake in peace. A few weeks after Albright’s visit, a joint Russia-U.S. statement exhorted fighting factions to renew a peace process that the United Nations had already declared to be virtually dead. Last week, Pakistan’s prime minister, representing a government long suspected of supporting the Taliban, initiated meetings with the Taliban’s opposition.

Whether this is posturing or represents calls for new concern is still unclear. But if this anniversary of the beginning of war is also read as an obituary for its possible ending, we would all be making a terrible mistake. The world that fought a proxy war in Afghanistan for nine years, and then ignored its travails for another nine years, has a responsibility to see Afghanistan through to a future that it--and all its people--can call its own.