Afghan Trips Become Election Issue

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher made himself an expert on a faraway country that, until last year, drew little notice from his Orange County constituents.

The Huntington Beach Republican toured the dusty mountain camps of Afghanistan in 1988, befriending rebel leaders fighting the Soviet invaders. Bearded and wearing some of the regional garb, Rohrabacher once encountered supporters of Osama bin Laden.

The congressman’s activities in the country intensified after the Soviets pulled out. He spent years trying to negotiate a peace to Afghanistan’s civil war, touring the region several more times.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks last year, Rohrabacher, who had been dismissed by many as a far-right ideologue, suddenly was sought out by the media and the Bush administration for his insights into the central Asian nation.

But as Rohrabacher seeks reelection, Democratic challenger Gerrie Schipske is trying to haunt him with that record, saying he’s done more harm than good in Afghanistan. She points to comments he made in 1996 praising Taliban fundamentalists as a force for stability. His diplomatic efforts have hurt U.S. interests in the region, she said, and have come at the expense of dealing with issues closer to home. “Not one person I’ve talked to thinks [what he’s done] is a statesman’s act,” Schipske said.

Rohrabacher, 55, angrily dismisses the criticism as the desperate acts of a challenger running in a solidly Republican district. “I think my constituents are very happy that someone gets in the face of gangsters and tyrants,” he said.

Rohrabacher has won every election in his district since 1988, by a wide margin. He has consistently dwarfed his challengers in fund-raising. This year, his district has been expanded to include Palos Verdes Peninsula and a portion of Long Beach, beefing up the margin of Republican voters.

Still, Rohrabacher’s work in Afghanistan has emerged as the major issue in what would otherwise be a low-key campaign.

It was a hot topic at the first of the candidates’ debates this month, and Schipske attacks the congressman in campaign literature that shows him squatting among Afghan fighters with a rifle balanced on his lap.

The controversy comes when Rohrabacher’s public profile has never been higher. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the U.S., the congressman has become a fixture on television news programs, and he has met several times with White House officials to discuss Afghanistan.

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Rohrabacher’s history with Afghanistan dates to 1981. As a young speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, he was outraged by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and identified with the ragtag band of rebels fighting the superpower.

Rohrabacher saw it as a clear-cut struggle of good versus evil, which appealed to his vision of the United States as a defender of democracy. His worldview was developed during years as a grass-roots GOP activist in California and member of Young Americans for Freedom, an activist group of young Republicans.

Adopting the underdog’s cause, he studied Afghanistan’s history and politics, becoming a specialist while writing speeches. In 1988, voters in coastal Orange County elected Rohrabacher to the House of Representatives, and he itched to visit the freedom fighters he’d lionized on paper.

Just months before he was sworn in, he traveled to Afghanistan and spent a week with a moujahedeen infantry unit fighting the Soviets.

“I wanted to get out there on the front lines with them so they would know I had the courage not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk,” he said.

He came back to Washington even more resolved to be their advocate.

The Soviet pullout in the early 1990s was a short-lived victory as Afghanistan slipped into a bloody civil war. Rohrabacher pushed for a peace agreement under which former king Zaher Shah would return, ushering in what he hoped would be an era of democracy. He met in Europe with warring factions, including some leaders who would later form the Taliban, the religious extremist group that ultimately took control of the country.

In 1996, he was quoted in the foreign policy publication Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, characterizing the Taliban takeover as a “positive development.” He predicted that the Taliban would bring “stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S.”

He also told the journal that the Taliban were “devout traditionalists, not terrorists [and] they did not seem intent on exporting their beliefs.”

His Democratic opponent has now jumped on that interview as evidence that Rohrabacher was misguided in his approach to a regime that would become infamous for human rights violations and harboring the terrorist network that attacked the United States last year.

Schipske also faults Rohrabacher for meeting in Qatar with Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakel in April 2001. She charges that the meeting was illegal under the Logan Act, a 200-year-old law that makes it a felony for a U.S. citizen to interfere in relations between the United States and foreign governments.

“It is simply outrageous that this rogue congressman engaged in negotiations with the Taliban,” she said.

Her campaign Web site details what she calls his foreign policy missteps, as well as his frequent overseas trips, asking: “Dana, when was the last time you visited an elementary school in Huntington Beach or Costa Mesa?”

Rohrabacher replied that he was in Qatar to attend a conference and only by chance met the Taliban’s foreign minister, who was staying at the same hotel in the capital city of Doha. Rohrabacher said he went to the foreign minister’s room and “unloaded on” the Taliban for half an hour about its human rights violations.

He said he recommended that the king come back as a candidate or to oversee elections. Foreign press accounts described it as Rohrabacher’s “personal peace plan.” As for his comments in 1996 about the Taliban, Rohrabacher said they were based on his hope that the fundamentalists would bring stability to the region. His interview was “laying down a marker” for Taliban leadership, he said. “We were giving them the benefit of the doubt. That lasted about two months.”

By 1997, as the Taliban’s human rights abuses and attacks on religious institutions became more widely known, Rohrabacher was calling Taliban leaders tyrants on the House floor. He urged Congress to condemn the practice of “gender apartheid” on Afghan women and girls.

He was joined by such unlikely allies as the Feminist Majority Foundation and Mavis Leno, “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno’s wife, who publicized the regime’s brutalities against females. Some of those who worked with Rohrabacher on behalf of Afghan causes are rallying to his defense against the campaign claims.

“It’s sad that someone who has fought against terrorism in the U.S. Congress is now having his record being used in a devious way,” said Afghan activist Hasan Nouri, an engineer from Laguna Hills who met Rohrabacher while the latter worked at the White House. Nouri enlisted Rohrabacher’s help for International Orphan Care, a charity Nouri established in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. Rohrabacher has now won praise from some foreign policy experts for his focus on Afghanistan.

“Dana has been consistently right about Afghanistan,” said Peter Tomsen, the former U.S. special envoy and ambassador to Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992. The problem, he said, is that until 9/11, “no one was listening.”

But the newfound respect accorded Rohrabacher inside the Beltway doesn’t necessarily extend to his district.

Some of his coastal constituents, regardless of party, say he’s out of touch. They see him as an absentee congressman who doesn’t know his neighbors or their needs.

“It’s characteristic of his general arrogance,” said Republican Rayna Zeidenberg of Huntington Beach.

Democrat George Giacoppe, a Huntington Beach resident, said Rohrabacher’s foreign freelancing is disturbing.

“If Jesse Jackson does something like this, I can pass it off as a play for headlines,” he said. “When [Rohrabacher does] it, I look at the separation of powers so essential to our republic and I cringe.”

Rohrabacher, however, says his activism is serving his district in the most fundamental way.

“People can attack me, but it’s not going to work. [National security] is the biggest problem of my district or any other district. If we’re not safe, nothing else is important.”