Cold War’s Last Battle Lingers on

Afghanistan enters its third decade of war on Monday. Battered by failed peace policies, unfinished military engagements and the perennial poverty of a war economy, Afghans remain the last people out in a global game whose rules have changed too often to remember.

When Soviet troops reached Kabul 20 years ago, the last great battle of the Cold War formally began. By moving its army across its southern border, the Soviet Union, countered by the United States and its motley collection of allies, superimposed a complex international agenda onto Asia’s regional problems. Afghanistan’s civil war, recast as a mix of anticommunism and global humanitarianism, became part of a superpower contest that transformed south, central and west Asia. Together with American hostages in Iran and Vietnamese boat people on the South China Sea, the fate of millions of Afghan refugees defined foreign policies whose political antecedents and intentions were far removed from the mountains of the Hindu Kush.

But Afghanistan’s unending war also became the first big war of the post-Soviet era and now of the coming century. In its longevity, and with the connivance of far too many interested external parties, the Afghan war has colored almost everything it has touched. Energy politics among relatively newly independent states, the fate of failing governments and the terrors they can encompass, the constraints that power politics impose on international organizations, the lenses through which Central Asia sees itself have been crafted by the world’s engagement in Afghanistan’s troubles.

Two decades have wrought enormous changes among the direct participants in Afghanistan’s war. The short-lived jubilation that attended the end of the Soviet empire has been tempered by instability in Central Asia, civil war and insurgency within Russia and the Caucasus, and a balance sheet that veers new capitalism sharply toward debt. Ironically, it is Iran, long the demon in the U.S. policy storybook, that fears the consequences of the Taliban’s Muslim militancy and Pakistani-based terrorism. And Pakistan’s praetorian state is still tangled in a web of domestic intolerance that shapes its policies toward Afghanistan, Iran and the United States.

But the combination of parochialism and globalism that brought the Soviet Union to its knees in Afghanistan lingers in U.S. policies as well. With their foreign policies tied to uncertain post-Cold War moorings, the United States and its European allies have reacted cautiously and contradictorily toward the political environments they helped to create.

Russia’s tempestuous democracy and uneven economy have proved to be greater challenges to international diplomacy than the West ever imagined, and the piecemeal practices of traditional diplomacy have proved unequal to understanding Russia’s problems and potential.

Even more troubling, the U.S. is now forced to focus parts of its foreign policy on fears of terrorism whose roots lie among Afghanistan’s disaffected moujahedeen. Whether or not global terrorism revolves around Osama bin Laden, a former freedom fighter himself, it is clear that the patronage structure of the anti-Soviet war included masterful missteps on the road to stability. Keen to vanquish the Soviet army, the U.S. paid scant attention to those in Asia who warned, 20 years ago, that the seeds of global instability were being sown among those who now man insurgencies in Kashmir, Chechnya, Dagestan and Afghanistan. Little wonder that pious warnings of terrorism by the U.S. are treated as sanctimony in South Asia.

The most important lesson that Afghanistan taught is one that the U.S. seems least interested in learning: The cost of politicizing humanitarian assistance was then, as now, unconscionably high. By making relief a weapon of war, the anti-Soviet alliance led Afghans into an assistance vortex from which they are still laboring to extricate themselves. Supply-side assistance assumed that the interests of expatriate-based moujahedeen groups coincided with those of Afghan refugees; the distribution of assistance made that assumption into a practical truth. Prosecuting war was made a part of the pursuit of peace, a misnomer that is still followed today. Neutrality, impartiality, humanitarianism, all were compromised to pursue a goal that, in far too many ways, seemed irrelevant to Afghans and Afghanistan.

Today, international institutions working in Afghanistan are still tethered to bilateral policies that, even without a Soviet threat, retain a belligerence. By establishing a single-issue agenda for Afghanistan--for example, the extradition of Bin Laden from Taliban-controlled territory--the U.S. has held Afghans hostage to the dalliances of diplomacy. Even more worrisome, U.S. policy plays havoc with nongovernmental relief efforts. Until last week, U.S.-sponsored sanctions thwarted the efforts of Nobel prize-winning Doctors Without Borders to deliver supplies to Afghans under siege. Offering technical excuses to justify policies that play politics with human lives, the U.S. has poisoned the well of goodwill that aid should deliver.

By treating humanitarian aid as a weapon of bilateral diplomacy, U.S. policy undercuts one of the few areas in which multilateral agreement was once possible. This autumn, U.N. efforts to end the supply of weapons and fuel to all fighting factions died a belated death--another victim in the endless struggle of outsiders to use Afghanistan’s wars for their own purposes.

Afghanistan is a proving ground for errors of political judgment that are then applied elsewhere. The United Nations has just published two remarkably revealing reports that take issue with almost every platitude of multilateral diplomacy. Reviewing its own profoundly misguided performance in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, these publications also underscore, and not for the first time, the real terrors that arise when strong governments impose their own policies on the international community. Almost a million Rwandans and countless thousands of Bosnians might have been saved but for the knowing inaction of members of the U.N. Security Council.

The U.S., however, seems hard of hearing. Preoccupied with the backlash from the Afghan war, the State Department is now toying with the idea of using food aid as a deliberate weapon in Sudan’s continuing civil war, hammering home a contorted policy that cruise missiles could not deliver to Khartoum and Afghanistan last year.

Afghanistan is the place where the West gradually contrived a confusing counterhumanitarian agenda to support its global security ambitions. The detritus of failed policies now muddies the waters of Central Asia, Central Africa and everywhere in between. Manipulating weak humanitarianism to wage war risked the timid internationalism and fragile consensus of the post Cold-War era. Surely the next century deserves better. *