Foreigners and Their Initiatives

For ten years a coalition of Western troops through NATO membership and United Nations approval have been ensconced in Afghanistan, battling an elusive, evasive and determined enemy of peace and decency acting as entitled religion-based extremists intent on regaining power in that country. The allied forces of various NATO member-countries have invested themselves, their diplomacy, their military, their treasury, in helping to secure war-torn Afghanistan for its people under the direction of Hamid Karzai, the country's Western-backed president.

This is the same Hamid Karzai who did the diplomatic rounds, visiting Western capitals to thank them for their sacrifices on behalf of his country's needs, and to invite them to continue with their presence in his country. And who later expressed his anger and mistrust of the motives of NATO and the United States in particular, when during an ongoing state of warfare, Afghan civilians were inadvertently targeted and killed in numbers dwarfed by those deliberately targeted and killed by the Taliban.

That would be the Taliban who have managed to successfully kill NATO soldiers, not necessarily through direct combat, but more often through the expedience of non-combat explosives called IEDs, bombs planted on highways and roads, both rural and urban to attain their death count, which includes, along with foreign military, civilian Afghans, men, women and children. And this would also be the Taliban whom Hamid Karzai recognizes as his fellow Pashtuns whose home is so close to his own, in Kandahar Province.

The Taliban, in fact, that Mr. Karzai sees, in a practical spasm of Realpolitik as reverting to their previous position as governors in tandem with his own governing body, a shared duty of fellow tribesmen. As for President Karzai and his values, this is the same man who accompanied the Presidents of Iraq and Pakistan to Iran to take part in the Islamic Republic of Iran's "counter-terrorism" conference held in Tehran in June, 2011. Where he and they agreed wholeheartedly that the United States was the primary source of terrorism in the world.

Left to right: Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon, Sudanese President ‘Omar Al-Bashir, Pakistani President Asif ‘Ali Zardari, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, at the “World Without Terrorism Conference” in Tehran, June 25, 2011.

A well-met company of peers representing violently dysfunctional states all posing a dire threat to world peace and stability. All of whom, just incidentally, have been availed of ongoing American financial support. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Not the conference in Iran needless to say, or the willing attendance of discordantly failed Muslim countries of the world, guilty of vicious human rights offences against their populations, threatening to engulf the Western world in a world-class conflagration of religious ideology.

The 'good idea' is representative of the Western-based thought that since we've invaded this poor miserable country mired in a stone-age existence to roust a terror group that has caused horrible damage in the West, why not give this poor country a hand up, enabling it to enter modernity, liberty, opportunity and prosperity? Good intentions, but a distinct failure to take into account that no amount of assistance will lift people out of an inherited culture of tribal and religious antipathies.

The result is, perhaps more convincingly than we would like to admit, that nothing permanently useful has been accomplished. The invading foreigners remain just that, despite concerted efforts to demonstrate otherwise by building civil infrastructure, teaching civil administration, funding medical facilities and schools, and installing aid agencies to assist Afghan civilians to learn how to help themselves.

The original suspicion, dread, anger and violent aversion to the presence of foreigners in a country that has always been invaded, occupied and oppressed, remain. Corruption, endemic to the society at every level, has eaten away steadily at the goodwill international resources and funding meant to offer the people of Afghanistan the opportunity to live lives thought of as 'normal' by Western standards.

The ordinary Afghan remains conflicted about what they can identify as progress through new engineering that has given them wells, clean sewage leading to improved hygiene, dams to assist in vital field irrigation, schooling for their children and medical attention for women in childbirth, and the contrast which is condemnation and violence meted out as reward by the Taliban for accepting these Western-style interferences with Islamist culture and heritage customs.

The initiative taken on by ISAF to gradually gain the confidence of ordinary Afghans through offering them opportunities for employment, for education and hygiene, and to reach for political freedom and social affirmation, and partnering with village elders through loya jirgas to plan initiatives together, with the elders identifying what they consider useful and the foreign presence undertaking to provide the useful initiatives did not turn out the successful minds-and-hearts-strategy presumed it would.

Bringing development to the people through road building and well building and tutelage has not worked because it did not emanate from the government of Hamid Karzai, whom his people see as corrupt, disinterested and incompetent. Foreign intervention had limited success. It was limited by the manner in which the Taliban have been able to create an atmosphere of fear among the people who in the end, aren't certain whom to trust; the Taliban and their promises, or the foreigners and their initiatives.