Remembering Afghanistan's Golden Age - NYtimes

WASHINGTON — From presidential confidants in the White House Situation Room to anchors on cable television to ruminators at the city’s think tanks, the view has settled in: Afghanistan is an ungovernable collection of tribes that has confounded every conqueror since Alexander the Great. Like a lot of received wisdom, it may well be correct.

In 1979, the Soviets invaded, occupied Afghanistan for the next decade and were finally driven out by American-backed mujahedeen fighters, some of whom went on to form the Taliban, an Islamic student militia, which took control in Kabul in 1996. The Taliban in turn were toppled by the Americans in 2001, but fighting continued.

And by the end of the 1970s, many of the educated elite had fled and resettled across Europe, Asia and the United States. Gone with them was the promise of those earlier decades, when Kabul solicited foreign aid from both Washington and Moscow that brought in electricity, dams and irrigation, and when a young Parliament was trying out a fledgling democracy.

“There was definitely what was developing to be a newer tradition of a more open society and trained people” in those earlier years, said Paula Newberg, director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, who was an adviser to President Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004.

For now, administration officials say that much of the debate in the Situation Room is centered on whether the United States should focus less on the weak central Afghan government or put more money and effort into the provinces, where warlords have traditionally ruled. “We shouldn’t worry so much about Karzai, we should worry about empowering the governors and getting better district chiefs and police chiefs,” said a senior State Department official.

“I think Afghanistan is governable,” the official said, “but the question is at what level?”
Remembering Afghanistan's Golden Age - nytimes

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