New York—Just outside Lashkargah, a town in southwest Afghanistan, stands a great brick arch overlooking the remains of a city that flourished before Genghis Khan. Driving to the monument over a ratted desert track, by empty cotton warehouses (opium poppy earns more), I cannot always distinguish what was destroyed by Soviet bombs, what by local factions, and what by the Mongol hordes.
Returning home, I find it almost impossible to convey the extremity of destruction in what was already one of the world’s poorest countries. And the destruction continues, not only in the civil war but in daily acts of violence. A country that can no longer produce even a bar of soap has been flooded with sophisticated weapons by foreign countries struggling for power and wealth.
It started with the Cold War. The Soviet Union invaded to prop up a failing Communist regime. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan funded the Islamic resistance (the mujahidin) in the largest covert operation in history. The Pakistani secret service funneled weapons to their favored groups—including Islamic extremists. Thinking Moscow would dig in for good, the United States gave little thought to the consequences, as long as the fighters killed Soviet troops.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, the Afghan regime it had propped up crumbled. But the mujahidin, along with the remnants of the army, turned into feuding warlords and ethnic militias. The Soviets had devastated villages that sheltered mujahidin; the victors made ruins of Kabul, the national capital, and other towns.
New strategic stakes emerged: access to the oil and natural gas of the newly independent, landlocked, states of Central Asia. Would Russia control new pipelines, as it had the old, or would new routes open? And if new routes went south, would they go through Iran, the object of U.S. sanctions, or to Pakistan via Afghanistan?
Pakistan saw its future in imposing a friendly—or subservient—government in Afghanistan and linking its economy to Central Asia via pipelines and roads through Afghanistan. Together with its nuclear weapons, such ties would offset the threat posed by its massive neighbor, India. Iran, however, determined to break the U.S. embargo by blocking pipeline routes that did not cross Iran.
When Pakistan’s former Afghan allies failed to gain power, it found a new one, the Movement of Islamic Taliban (students). This ultraconservative group started as a revolt against the warlords in southern Afghanistan, dominated by the Pashtun ethnic group. Some in the U.S. government hoped it would unify the country and guard the pipeline route.
With Pakistani aid, the Taliban captured the capital and two-thirds of the country’s territory. The remainder, which contains nearly half the country’s population, is controlled by various armed factions drawn from other ethnic groups. Iran supplies them, as do Russia and Central Asian states, fearful of the Taliban’s approach to their borders.
The Taliban have outraged much of the world by banning women from schools, jobs, and hospitals—temporarily, they say, until proper Islamic arrangements can be made. And although international agencies struggle to help Afghans and respect basic principles in Taliban areas, they have fled most of the rest of the country after repeated looting by undisciplined fighters.
Despair about Afghanistan may be intellectually respectable, but we cannot walk away from a civil war in a region with new nuclear powers, bordering on the world’s major sources of energy. And the United States has a special responsibility: we paid for many of the weapons that have destroyed Afghanistan, and we helped put them in the wrong hands.
After decades of war and division, Afghanistan cannot be reassembled in a day. Before Afghans can reach agreement, their neighbors must stop fueling the battle. The United States must press on all fronts—diplomatic and economic—to back up a recent UN protest against foreign military and logistical supplies to Afghanistan. The nuclear tests in South Asia should not remove Afghanistan from our agenda with Pakistan.
And as long as we can, the UN and other agencies must stay engaged with the Afghan people, helping them survive and build grassroots institutions that will outlive the war. In their different ways, both the Taliban and their opponents make this task a formidable one. But the Afghan people, who suffered more than anyone to end the Cold War, have not had an easy time either.