After Bombs Must Come Civil Rights

With the rapid collapse of Taliban forces throughout most of Afghanistan, many commentators have uncorked the champagne. “War works!” trumpeted the New York Times, and the press is full of pictures of triumphant Northern Alliance soldiers.

If the Taliban is finished, good riddance. For years, human rights groups have struggled to call world attention to the Taliban’s brutal interpretation of Islam, and particularly its oppression of women. The Taliban’s support of Osama bin Laden was merely the final straw.

But celebrations are premature. Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network apparently remains intact. What’s more, the continued chaos in Afghanistan poses an ongoing threat to regional stability, to the long-term success of the U.S. “war against terrorism,” and to the rights and lives of ordinary Afghans--especially women.

Ensuring that Afghanistan’s future is less blood-drenched than its past will certainly require a long-term commitment of money and talent, as the U.S. works with the U.N. to help rebuild the nation’s devastated civic infrastructure. But it may also require us to use force--possibly against our erstwhile Northern Alliance allies--to protect human rights and foster democracy in a post-Taliban Afghanistan.

So far, the U.S. has aided anti-Taliban forces on the apparent principle that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. But the viciousness of Northern Alliance troops during the last decade of Afghan civil war was legendary, so much so that many Afghans--and the U.S. State Department--initially greeted the Taliban’s 1996 takeover with relief.

What are the chances, post-Taliban, of lasting gains for Afghan women and civilians? Slim, if we leave it to the Northern Alliance. Some snapshots from the Alliance’s recent past: in 1995, Alliance troops “went on a rampage, systematically looting whole streets and raping women” in parts of Kabul, according to the State Department’s 1996 country report. Witnesses reported that hundreds of women committed suicide to avoid the mass rapes, many by throwing themselves out of high windows. Fahima Vorgetts, an Afghan women’s rights activist, recalls bitterly that Alliance troops treated women as “movable property,” carrying them off as part of the booty of war.

When Northern Alliance forces took Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997, they massacred several thousand Taliban prisoners of war. Some were lined up and shot; others blown up by grenades or drowned in wells. Throughout the war, the Alliance indiscriminately bombed civilian populations, and used children as soldiers and minesweepers. Recent reports of lootings and executions by Alliance troops in Mazar-i-Sharif suggest that little has changed.

We should know by now that the enemy of our enemy is rarely a reliable friend. The U.S. armed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a counter to Iran, only to end up at war with him a few years later. We gave the moujahedeen who later became the Taliban their most lethal weapons during the 1980s. At one point the CIA even helped support Osama bin Laden.

Getting rid of the Taliban is a necessary but insufficient step in the war on terror. If we leave post-Taliban Afghanistan floundering in violence and despair, we will have merely added fertilizer to a breeding ground for terrorists who will one day--with some justice--blame the United States and its allies for much of what is wrong with their world.

Building a democratic post-Taliban Afghanistan is in our self-interest: It is also the only way to avoid shameful hypocrisy. Since Sept. 11, U.S. officials have rightly condemned the Taliban’s human rights record, and First Lady Laura Bush told the nation last week that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Now we need to show that we mean it.

We should accelerate planning for an interim U.N.-sponsored government to take charge until Afghan society is capable of sustaining a genuine rights-respecting democracy in which women are full participants. If this means getting tough with our Northern Alliance proxy soldiers, we shouldn’t shrink from doing so if that’s the only way to keep them from committing more atrocities.

The lesson from past interventions is crystal clear: protecting human rights and ensuring political stability can’t be accomplished by hand-wringing alone. Sometimes it takes muscle--muscle that goes beyond simply dropping bombs from on high.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, U.N. peacekeepers stood by while forces backed by former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic slaughtered thousands of civilians at Srebrenica. Consequently, Milosevic came back to haunt us, expensively, a few years later. In Rwanda, U.N. soldiers retreated while nearly a million civilians were hacked to death. Since then, Rwanda’s conflict has spilled over to destabilize a wide swath of Central Africa.

In Kosovo, I watched a U.N. official weep as he recounted how heavily armed NATO peacekeepers passively watched as a Serbian mob beat an Albanian women. In Sierra Leone, I saw despairing refugees fleeing rebel atrocities, at a time when the world showed more concern for the few hundred U.N. peacekeepers taken prisoner by the rebels than for the many thousands of civilians those very soldiers had been sent to protect. Sierra Leone remains unstable today--and, irony of ironies, recent evidence suggests that Sierra Leone’s rebels have profited mightily by selling illegally mined diamonds to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

We need to learn from past mistakes to break the cycle of atrocity and terror in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance is unlikely to include women or other ethnic groups in a post-Taliban government unless compelled to do so. Therefore, U.N. troops sent to provide security in Afghanistan must be given a robust mandate to protect human rights and safeguard fledgling democratic institutions. Peacekeepers will need rules of engagement that allow them to use force when necessary to accomplish these goals.

Some will claim that insisting on human rights, women’s rights and democracy in a foreign land is “neo-colonialist.” But there is nothing “un-Islamic” about basic human rights. Rina Amiri, an Afghan activist now at Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program, observes that “thirty years ago Afghan women enjoyed many more political rights than they have today.” Helping to restore to Afghan women the rights that twenty years of war and extremist Islamic oppression took away from them is not an imposition of outside values, but a restoration of pre-war Afghan values.

In the end, concern about “imposing” our principles on post-Taliban Afghanistan is not only self-defeating but strikingly disingenuous. We didn’t hesitate to impose our American bombs on the Afghan population. We shouldn’t now hesitate to impose our commitment to human rights and democracy.