Afghanistan 'After' the American War - Ann Jones

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

Ten months ago, on December 28, 2014, a ceremony in Kabul officially marked the conclusion of America’s very long war in Afghanistan. President Obama called that day “a milestone for our country.” After more than 13 years, he said, “our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.”

That was then. This is now. In between, on September 28, 2015, came another milestone: the Taliban takeover of Kunduz, the capital of the province of the same name in northern Afghanistan, and with a population of about 270,000, the country’s fifth-largest city.

The next day I got an email from a woman newly assigned to the American Embassy in Afghanistan. Security rules keep her confined behind the walls of the embassy grounds, she said.  Still, knowing that Afghan women are not “secure,” she is determined to help them. Her plan, admittedly still in the brainstorming stage, calls for “programs that will teach women how to defend themselves in some form or another,” because “the best way for women to be safe is for them to know how to keep themselves safe.”

Nothing stays steady in Afghanistan.  Even promising developments have a way of turning dark. Yet my friend Mahbouba, tossed between hope and despair, always tries to take in the big picture, even as it shifts its shape before her eyes.  A member of the Afghan royal family, she was imprisoned in 1978 as a young university graduate, together with her family, by Soviet-inspired Afghan communists who helped to overthrow the country's first president.  Eventually released, she and her family fled to the United States just before the Soviet army invaded in 1979.  She became an American citizen, devoted to American-style democracy as she found it at that time.

Now she writes of the catastrophic taking of Kunduz, “It has already become just another bureaucratic problem: yet another indicator of something or other slightly amiss. The government again has put in place a ‘fact-finding committee’ with two men in charge, one representing the president [Ashraf Ghani], and the other the country’s Chief Executive Officer [Abdullah Abdullah].” Such bureaucratic duplication is the result of what Mahbouba calls “the two-headed legacy: this divided government with its disparate policies coming to nothing, crippling the country.” That contentious, unequal power-sharing deal was cobbled together just a year ago when Secretary of State John Kerry resolved a bitter presidential campaign between the two men by inventing a new entity, “the National Unity Government,” unknown in the Afghan constitution. - Read More at huffingtonpost

Afghanistan 'After' the American War

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