Somewhere north of Afghanistan, someone in the Kremlin is opening a bottle of expensive champagne. You can almost hear that cork pop.
But the war that is left behind, the one that will begin as soon as tomorrow, or the next day, or when the last foreign soldier leaves its soil, might be even costlier and bloodier.
What Afghanistan lacks, even before the US finally leaves, is a functioning government. What our stay in the troubled land has wrought, is corruption on a massive scale, and incompetence in governing that is even more troubling than the graft that is sucking up every last dollar that can still be found.
The Taliban has won, in a way that is almost shameless. They have opened an office in Doha, Qatar, and placed a new flag and an inscription that reads "Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan" over their door, as they await to take center stage at the multilateral talks scheduled to take place very soon. The president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has already announced that his army had taken control of the country, with echoes reminiscent of the annunciation of Iraq's 'sovereignty' only a few years ago. Everyone, it seems, is running toward some imaginary finish line.
But what will really happen to Afghanistan, once the international forces are gone, and the separate ethnic and sectarian group try to reclaim power?
In the beginning, there were dreams: a 'liberated' Afghanistan, rid of extremists, a vibrant democracy where human rights and responsible governance became reality and so on and so forth. Now the US has already signaled that it will allow the Taliban to do as it pleases in Afghanistan, as long as they refrain from harboring Al Qaeda.
What does this mean in reality? In reality, the two factions that make up the Taliban will fight each other, one to impose an Islamic state that has horrific implications for women, and the other, searching to have a voice globally, a more moderate application of the same Islamic law.
The signs are not good. Women are already fearing the worse. In the areas where international presence has already waned, the Taliban is back to its old tricks, cutting hands and decapitating two children who they contend were spies for the Afghan forces. Bombings followed in the heart of the capital, Kabul that killed 17, just a few days later.
Even more interesting, the talks in Qatar, which should be multilateral in theory, including the US, the Taliban and Karzai, will see an unusual development. The Quetta Shura, the council that 'guides' the different Taliban factions that will come to the table, will be lead by none other than that one eyed cleric we tried so hard to kill: Mullah Omar.
What will come of the talks then? The consensus is that there is no consensus, and there might never be one, and as loudly as Karzai stomps his feet that he should be the leading force in the talks, and therefore exercise true sovereignty for and through his country, what Karzai really wants is to have protection form the international community after the US withdraws completely.
If this is a victory, I don't know what we should call a loss.
Op-ed
Partial Source : Spiegel/ 6.21.13
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