Public pronouncements by two senior figures of the Western-sponsored Afghan administration have put the regime’s crisis of credibility into sharp focus. General Bismullah Khan has called for the U.S. to speed up training of the Afghan army, while one of President Karzai’s senior security advisers, former Northern Alliance general Qasim Fahim, slammed the president in a local newspaper interview as a weak leader whose government wouldn’t last a week if foreign troops left the country.
What neither official (nor Karzai and his foreign sponsors) want to talk about is the huge gap in numbers between the Western-trained army and the many illegal armed militia groups that still dominate the Afghan scene. The country’s U.N.-supervised disarmament agency has determined that there are still up to 2,000 armed groups across Afghanistan, with upwards of 125,000 men in arms.
Meantime the Afghan National Army, the ANA, has only 40,000 trained troops, with the U.S. military’s target of fielding 70,000 soldiers by year’s end now looking entirely unrealistic.
The irony here will be especially bitter to the families of U.S. and NATO soldiers who have been killed or wounded in the West’s effort to prop up the Kabul government. Because a stunning 500 of those 2,000 holdout militia groups are under the command of individuals who enjoy plum jobs in and around the top echelons of the president’s embattled regime - including both Bismullah Khan and Fahim.
Worse, few if any of these militias fight the Taliban and al Qaeda. That’s left to the ANA and the 50,000 foreign troops under U.S. and NATO control.
So how do Afghanistan’s tens of thousands of hired guns pass the time? Most, like the militia of Uzbek strongman Rashid Dostum, and that of the leading warlord-MP in the Afghan parliament, Abdul Sayyaf, support their bosses’ various business exploits, while casting a threatening shadow across any politician’s plans – especially those of reform-minded parliamentarians – to restrain the influence of the country’s regional warlords.
Another ironic aspect of this scandal is typical of the blowback-prone policies of the White House and the Pentagon: most of the old ghouls compromising Afghanistan’s future were empowered by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the Taliban’s expulsion from Kabul in November, 2001. Dostum walked side by side with Karzai, Fahim (and a certain Gen. Tommy Franks) to Karzai’s investiture as interim Afghan leader.
Now, as you read this, Dostum’s militia is taking up position to depose the governor of northern Jowzjan province, a Karzai appointee. Sayyaf’s purported criminality is so considerable that U.S. forces raided his home last year, looking for evidence. The raid prompted outrage from President Karzai.
Installed by the U.S., then elected as president, Karzai remains so weak that he relies on Sayyaf’s support.
Now that’s blowback, great gusts of it, taking more dips and turns than the Afghan-Pakistan border.
