Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters

In Afghanistan, no one stays bought.

viction of the Taliban from governance in Afghanistan suggests to ill-informed average Americans that Bush’s military campaign against terrorism is succeeding. But a closer look commands the conclusion that the administration’s obtuse and short-sighted political strategy—or rather what passes for one—is fraught with peril for the long term.

The rapidity of the Taliban’s collapse was due as much to changing allegiances by Pashtun and other warlords and clan chiefs as it was to U.S. military action. The BBC has aired footage of U.S. helicopters ferrying bales of money to the interior to purchase defecting tribal leaders. The problem is that in Afghanistan, no one stays bought. Those who removed their turbans yesterday will put them back on tomorrow if they think it’s to their advantage, and the ethnic rivalries that have resurfaced with a vengeance mean that Operation Enduring Freedom has driven the country to the brink of a fratricidal civil war of the kind that allowed the Taliban—who promised order—to come to power in the first place.

The Bush propagandists, with First Lady Laura as their spearhead, recently launched a campaign designed to highlight the Taliban’s truly stomach-turning repression of women (probably aimed at the president’s electoral gender gap more than at world opinion). But the Northern Alliance is not much better. As Tahmeena Faryal, spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) recently reminded us: “From 1992 to 1996, these forces waged a brutal war against women using rape, torture, abduction and forced marriage as their weapons. Many women committed suicide as their only escape.”

RAWA has been working against the Taliban for years, its activists courageously risking their lives to run underground schools for women in violation of Mullah Omar’s lethal decrees, so their assessment of the Northern Alliance leaders’ previous rule as a “living hell” is highly credible—particularly when it was documented by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Alliance’s difference from the Taliban is that the drug-dealing thugs of the Alliance like to listen to music while they rape you and watch television afterward.

ush’s public appeal to the Alliance not to enter Kabul was a startling admission that the precipitous military campaign had undermined the administration’s stated goal of a broad-based, multi-ethnic government for Afghanistan. In any event, the Alliance heeded him not. Its Tajik faction not only took Kabul, installing themselves in all key ministries, but brought back exiled President Burhanuddin Rabbani (a strict fundamentalist who supported Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War) to the Afghan capital, further violating their promises to Bush. As In These Times went to press, an army of more than 1,000 Alliance troops who are Hazaras (descendants of Genghis Khan’s Mongols) are ready to move into Kabul and dispute the Tajik power grab. Meanwhile, in the drug-dealing capital of Jalalabad near the Pakistan frontier, multiple armed factions have seized different parts of the city, and roving bands of militiamen are described as beyond their leaders’ control.

The Alliance has made it clear that no foreign troops are welcome on Afghan soil—so much for the proposed U.N. peacekeeping force. (England’s postponement of sending more special forces to Afghanistan is partly a response to these declarations and partly a sign of British disagreement with U.S. objectives on the ground, which continue to emphasize a military, not political, solution.) And the Alliance sees no role for the U.S. cat’s paw King Zahir except as a “simple citizen.” While Alliance spokesmen have accepted the notion of U.N.-sponsored talks about an ethnically broad-based government, they are only stalling for time while they consolidate their control over as much of the country as possible. The great prize is not the promised U.S.-British financial aid—there is great skepticism in Afghanistan as to whether it will materialize, given the West’s abandonment after the Soviets were chased out—but the lucrative heroin trade, which provides 70 percent of the country’s gross national product.

Enough Taliban fighters appear to have fled both to the mountains of Afghanistan and to the neighboring wild and lawless frontier provinces of Pakistan (dominated by Pashtuns) to continue guerrilla war for years. If the Taliban’s control over the greater part of Afghan territory seemingly has ended, the appeal of umma to the minds of much of the Muslim world has not. Umma is a powerful word not easily translated, meaning Islamic community, solidarity and the dissolution of the individual in the collective spirit. This ancient concept, one of the major themes of Muhammed’s preachings, has been given a new and radical form as the driving theology of Islamic fundamentalism in its retrogressive rejection of modernity and Western-inspired “decadence.”

The “defeat” of the Taliban by the world’s only superpower, accompanied by the civilian casualties shown on TV throughout the Muslim world, has only fueled the martyr-fetish of what moderate Islamic scholars disdainfully call “ummism,” which fantasizes a return to the glorious Islam of the Middle Ages. According to German security services, some 70,000 adepts of fundamentalist ummism from 50 countries passed through the al-Qaeda Afghan training camps. And that’s not counting the untold thousands of locally recruited and trained ummists in a wide swath of the world from Nigeria (where a third of the provinces have replaced civil law with sharia) and Morocco to Indonesia and the Phillipines. Bombs can never erase the most extreme terrorist manifestations of ummism around the world, but only create new bin Ladens everywhere. Dubya’s lip-service wishing Muslims a “blessed Ramadan” is no substitute for a political solution to the problem of terrorism, which must encompass both a global law enforcement effort—which the war impairs—and a serious attempt to redress the North-South poverty divide.

The speed of the Taliban’s unraveling also gives fresh impetus to the demands for a new war on Iraq. As National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice put it on Meet the Press, “We don’t need September 11 to tell us that Saddam Hussein is a threat to us.” She added that “we’ll take care” of him “eventually.”

eanwhile, the march toward the garrison state engendered by the long war continues apace. Consider the Bush administration’s plan for a new, gargantuan CIA. Under this plan, the CIA will take over military intelligence operations now lodged in the Defense Department. To the CIA bureaucrats’ long history of incompetence and misjudgments will now be added the even more mentally spavined capacities of the uniformed services. (Remember the bon mot that military intelligence is to intelligence as military music is to music?) To this collection of dubious talent will be added the electronic intelligence functions of the National Security Agency, giving the lads at Langley control over a “sigint” establishment that claims it can monitor anything, anywhere, any time. This new intelligence conglomerate will make the old CIA look like your local school board by comparison—the agency’s budget will soar from an estimated $4 billion annually (these numbers, of course, are officially secret) to something over $50 billion (including the recent war-related increases). And this new CIA on steroids, don’t forget, will now have authority to operate domestically.

At the same time, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s announced “wartime reorganization” of the Justice Department—under which the anti-terrorism campaign will be given overarching priority—is being used to gut the enforcement of laws that annoy the corporate world. The “wartime reorganization” will eviscerate enforcement of environmental and consumer protections and civil rights laws, and emasculate the already faint-hearted targeting of corporate and white-collar crime in the suites.

These twin initiatives represent a seismic shift in the shape and texture of the federal government—yet you haven’t heard a peep of protest from the supine Democratic leadership in Congress (or from Al Gore or Bill Clinton). If the Republicans are proving imaginative in using the war as cover to advance their reactionary domestic political agenda—and not just on the economic front—the congressional Democrats seem bereft of ideas.

The threat of bioterrorism in the wake of the anthrax scare has dramatically raised public awareness of the degree to which our starved public health system is disastrously overburdened and fragile, creating a political opening for a major new Democratic initiative to renew and expand the way government serves the health needs of the citizenry (as recent passage of a referendum favoring a universal health care system run by the state in Maine suggests). If they were clever, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt also would take advantage of the national mood and use the threat of terrorism to insist on beefing up the inspection of our notoriously polluted food supply.

Yet the congressional Democrats are content to make the centerpiece of their political offensive a “compromise” economic stimulus package—half tax cuts, half temporary unemployment and insurance benefits—which is, as the French would say, mi figue, mi raisin (half fig and half grape), and which will neither stimulate the economy with its trickle-down economics nor provide anything more than momentary palliatives for hard-pressed working families hit by the deepening recession, let alone ameliorate the lot of the underemployed and the poor.

Need one explain why? Well, the Democrats, preoccupied with re-election, are playing their usual game of trying to throw a few crumbs to the labor movement to ensure its continued support while at the same time currying favor with the corporate special-interest lobbies and their ladlings of campaign cash.

Some Pollyannas on the left are predicting that the November elections—which produced Democratic gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey—mean that Democrats are back in the game for 2002. That’s a serious misreading, for those two elections simply prove that the guys with the most money won. The 2-to-1 cash advantage that gave the new Democratic governors their wide margins of victory will be absent in the 2002 congressional elections. With Democrats having failed so far to develop a coherent set of popular issues to take to the country, and with nearly nine of 10 Americans approving Bush’s performance, it is hard to find any reason for optimism.

The U.S. public seems ready to accept not only predations against their liberties, but a widened war. A new poll shows three-quarters favor reinstating the military draft. What has happened in Afghanistan is not, to borrow Churchill’s phrase, “the beginning of the end” of the long war, but only “the end of the beginning.”

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