Civilization Is Placed on Hold During a Seemingly Endless War

It is testament to our collective indifference that we now measure Afghanistan’s war not in months or years but in decades. Two decades of war--even more, if we count the civil strife that preceded the 1979 Soviet incursion--have brought devastation and despair to Afghanistan and turmoil to its neighbors. Suddenly, the 30 Years War isn’t so hard to imagine.

Ten years ago last Sunday, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. After almost a decade of war, most of the 5,000 troops remaining in the country crossed the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, leaving behind physical destruction and political turmoil. For the Soviet Union, the Geneva accords that required its withdrawal signaled the beginning of the end: Two years later, it dissolved, overburdened by the costs of military engagement and public disenchantment.

For Afghanistan, the accords simply ended another phase in a seemingly endless war. The moujahedeen’s backers all turned away, leaving the country to cope on its own. Anti-Soviet battles turned into internecine fighting, faction against faction, with no thought to human privation. As fragmentation turned into state failure, the first and most tragic consequence of war was the loss of Afghanistan as a viable state.

When a state fails, nothing works. Roads, water supply, food, health care--the necessities of life become heavy burdens. Worse still, the basic attributes of communities, the lifeline of civil society that sustained Afghans through the first decade of hostilities, whether at home or in refugee camps, have been shattered by continuing combat, in which only fighters and profiteers have a stake. Peace requires an environment that fosters it. Failed states nurture only dreams.

War remains an indelible feature of the Afghan landscape and, by extension, of the region. Not a day goes by without a poignant speech from regional leaders exhorting factions to put down their arms and make the area safe for Afghanistan’s neighbors. Afghanistan’s fate is now inexorably linked to nuclearized South Asia and energy-rich but cash-poor Central Asia. The paradoxes of war have made Afghanistan, which barely functions, a looking glass through which its neighbors see, and seal, their fates.

Buried beneath the physical detritus and mortality rates are old histories arrayed around newly articulated disputes. Since the Taliban movement took control of most of the country in 1996, sectarian and ethnic schisms have returned as major elements of life. Splits between urban and rural sensibilities, masked as religious or ideological preference, have been renewed. The primacy of military struggle is underscored daily by a regimen of edicts that allow virtually no free choice. The Cold War has been replaced by contests between Islamists and secularists; modernists and traditionalists; Shias and Sunnis; and Pushtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras.

These are all disputes the international community halfheartedly condemns and rarely acts to correct: The world would like the problem of Afghanistan to go away. Petition drives and bold statements from Western leaders publicize the fact of gender discrimination, but rarely examine the broader human-rights protections needed to reverse it. Iranian leaders, set on their own path toward democracy, condemn the Taliban as obscurantist and backward-looking, but would prefer that Afghan refugees go home. Uzbekistan has long backed northern Afghan leaders, who allow some modernism, but has erected a virtual wall to ensure that Afghanistan’s travails do not cross its border, and is busy repositioning itself in an emerging security architecture for Central Asia. Turkmenistan, still convinced a trans-Afghan gas pipeline can make its way toward Pakistan, maintains a neutrality toward Afghanistan that leaves it at some remove from serious diplomacy. Pakistan, long the region’s most active protagonist in Afghanistan, is mired in a victim’s vocabulary: Daily government statements lament blowback and spillovers, as if 25 years of intervention and meddling, with and without foreign backing, should carry no costs.

Such illusions have proved dear. The region’s greatest vulnerabilities come from the twinned fates of the failed Afghan state and a faltering Pakistani state whose citizens fear their neighbor’s failure. Afghanistan suffers from an interplay of military conquest, civilian repression and population displacement. Pakistan’s concerns are equally tangible: local sectarianism spawns local terrorism, the running sore of engagement in Kashmir and Afghanistan, palliatives offered to restive religious and nationalist groups, weakens the political economy and risks human-rights protections.

A widely circulated Urdu newspaper recently warned, “When the writ of law loses its grip on a society . . . different groups start vying for the supremacy of their own set of rules.” Government, struggling to maintain control, has ceded many key responsibilities to the military.

But it is ideology, not technical competence, that threatens stability. Transnational political parties, which grew during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, have attained new heights. What Pakistanis now call the “Talibanizing” of Pakistani society is the logical outgrowth of Pakistan’s own foreign and domestic policies. In the 1980s, its military government joined with the United States and an array of allies to create a transnational ideological crusade that politicized religion to fuel the anti-Soviet war and, as a result, negated the possibilities of civil politics. Its choices are now maturing: Afghans and Pakistanis alike are victims of past policies and the foibles of current leaders. The Taliban cannot spill over to Pakistan: Its roots are already there.

It is in revived politics that improvement, if not salvation, lies. Without open political discourse, governments may survive but states disintegrate. Without civil politics, confrontation takes center stage, and governments cannot resolve conflict or address its underlying causes. Without politics, policy is reduced to managing low expectations and achieving even lower results.

In the name of future Afghan politics, then, diplomacy is critical. In muted acknowledgment of the anniversary of Friendship Bridge, Afghan factions met last week in Turkmenistan to discuss, again, cease-fires, prisoner exchanges and other issues that contribute to diplomacy but cannot substitute for it. This month, diplomats representing Afghanistan’s neighbors may meet in Uzbekistan. Under the umbrella of the United Nations, and together with representatives of Russia and the United States, they will again consider Afghanistan’s plight and their own choices.

They are unlikely to revisit history, though a simple bow to the past could inspire some humility. Instead, they will balance short-term profit against long-term gain. With luck, the lure of future oil and gas pipelines will override the familiarity of low-intensity interventions. If Afghans are lucky, rational fears for the integrity of the region will finally bring an end to arms shipments, fuel supplies and fighters to the factions that have rent the fabric of Afghan society.

Once again, they will have the chance to revive legitimate political discourse--among themselves, for a start--as the only way to resolve Afghanistan’s conflicts and its neighbors’ troubles. If they grasp the moment, diplomacy just might prevail. If not, we will be counting conflict in decades well into the new century.