Charles Glass’s latest book is Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation, 1940-44.
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Vol. 26 No. 22 · 18 November 2004
pages 11-14 | 5945 words
‘You can have patience or you can have carnage’
Charles Glass on US failures in Afghanistan
Kabul, since 1776 the nominal if forever ignored capital of Afghanistan, hides itself within thousands of forbidding walls. Mounds of ancient brick race up hillsides, remnants of the fifth-century ramparts that failed to preserve decadent Hindu rule from Mughal conquest. Every private house and most public buildings are set inside mud and brick enclosures that give the city an unwelcoming air. Behind the walls, in gardens needing rain, lie separate huts for women, for cooking, for eating and for receiving guests. Only the shops open directly onto broken pavements, with random displays of carpets, stationery, books, computers, cameras, jewellery and mobile phones. The customers, like the shopkeepers, are men, most of them clothed in traditional sharwal khameez and jaunty turbans. ‘Now and then,’ Robert Byron wrote in 1933, ‘a calico beehive with a window at the top flits across the scene. This is a woman.’ Contemporary Kabul is closer to Byron’s description than to a 1977 guidebook’s city of ‘mini-skirted schoolgirls’. The schoolgirls are now matrons, who venture out in their beehives to shop in the Women’s Bazaar. Their mini-skirts long abandoned, they would not dare to enter a tea house or linger in a public square.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 24 · 16 December 2004
From Kenneth Meyer
Charles Glass talks of the ‘American invasion’ of Afghanistan in 2001, and the ‘American creation of a government under Hamid Karzai’ (LRB, 18 November). But Afghanistan was already in the middle of a civil war. The Taliban lines were broken by US bombing and attacks by the Northern Alliance. Afghan troops advanced and took Kabul. With the exception of the special forces that functioned as spotters for the bombardments, no US troops were present in that advance. As for the creation of the interim Afghan government, that was managed by a gathering of Afghan exile and resistance groups in Bonn in November and December 2001; the US had nothing to do with it. In choosing Karzai, a Pashtun, these groups understood that it might be best if their leader were from the largest single ethnic group. Even the Uzbek and Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance understood this. Glass insinuates that Karzai is told what to do by the US ambassador, but the US has no interest in ‘taking over’ Afghanistan. The idea is for the Afghans to take it over, and have a government elected by the majority of Afghans.
Glass repeatedly compares US policies in Afghanistan to those in Vietnam, but the two situations couldn’t be more unalike. It has been crucial to the US in Afghanistan that their military involvement be minimal. Nato troops (no US troops) are in the capital; Glass says that 18,000 troops are currently stationed along the Pakistan border, but no US troops are in garrison in Afghan cities. They are there only to chase after Taliban remnants and Osama bin Laden. Glass laments that the destruction of Kabul is more extensive and worse than that of Baghdad: yes, but 95 per cent of it was done before 1996, by the warring Afghan factions.
Glass is not impressed by the recent Afghan presidential election. Perhaps he sees such elections as ‘devices of legitimisation’. But you have to start somewhere. When I was in Peshawar in early October, NGOs and other elements were involved in registering Afghans in refugee camps for the election. The response was so overwhelming that the registration process had to be extended by two days. These are the people who, Glass reports, are ‘not supporting the central government’.
Glass claims that the central government mandate doesn’t extend beyond the capital. But if Karzai can keep the capital quiet and increase confidence in the new regime, that is progress. If the new administration can extend its control towards the Khyber Pass and Jalalabad, as it is doing, that is progress. Glass seems not to have heard that Ismael Khan, the governor of Herat, was recently dismissed, and that new Afghan army units have been deployed to the western province. That, too, is progress.
Kenneth Meyer
Hong Kong
