Mayank Chhaya Daily

A short perspective on Afghanistan

The problem with the war in Afghanistan is that it has lost its rationale. For that matter it has no defined objectives. In a land where primal tribal relations fuse and fracture routinely it is impossible to create a modern nation-state. 

The Afghani people are conscious of the specificity of their identity only when it comes under assault from outsiders. Otherwise they are happy with the fusion and fracture that go on in their society as long as they are prompted by the Afghanis themselves. Not a very promising place for those who descend there armed with lofty visions of creating a modern democratic nation-state.

Mature enough to be rigged

Afghan President Hamid Karzai

Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah says President Hamid Karzai has rigged the national election. This is the first real sign that Afghan democracy has matured enough to be rigged. Who in his right mind would want to go so far as to rig an election to rule a people who are pathologically averse to being ruled? Karzai must want to remain president quite badly.

Dr. Abdullah, who is an ophthalmologist, has been quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "He (Karzai) uses the state apparatus in order to rig an election. That is something which is not expected." Well, that's exactly how you rig an election Dr. Abdullah squared, and that is exactly what is expected of a leader who cannot live in Kabul unless he is inside the presidential palace.

Other democracies become worthwhile enough to be rigged after decades. Afghanistan has accomplished it in less than ten years. That in itself is an accomplishment.

I seriously wonder whether Karzai can and will live in Kabul as a former president. He has tied his personal security and fortunes so closely to being in power that the only other option for him may be to leave the country. It is easier to rig an election than to leave the country.

My cynicism apart it is a good sign that Afghanistan is at least going through the motions of democracy. That is much more than what can be expected of a country where people's fingers are chopped off for voting.

"If a woman says no, the man has the right not to feed her."

It is bad enough being a woman in Afghanistan. What is worse, it seems, is being a widow. The New York Times has a documentary short on how widows in Afghanistan are forced to languish in societal rejection and poverty. Considering that there are two million Afghani women, that is one in every seven Afghani women, this is a problem bigger that what is realized.

It is not as if that many of these two million women had a fantastic life even when their husbands were alive. Many of them lived a life of cruel subservience because of the medieval social mores of Afghani society. Worse fate awaited them after their husbands died with their families rejecting them, their children being taken away and eventually being forced to beg on the hostile streets of cities like Kabul.

For some incomprehensible reasons widowhood is viewed as a curse in South Asian culture, including in India which has had an equally embarrassing record of humiliating widows. To some extent the socio-religious reform of the late 18^th century and the early 19^th century by Ram Mohan Roy did improve life for widows in India in the following decades but in many parts of India widows have been shunned as if they are some kind of pestilence.

The non-sense handed down the generations has been that a woman’s world must end with the death of her husband since he is the center of her existence. The revolting idea that men ought to be fulcrum of society was created by men and perpetuated with some complicity by women as well. Unless women in Islam and in other religions/cultures of the region reclaim their rightful position with whatever force it takes, they will continue to be debased in the cruelest possible manner.

The ongoing fight over the enactment of a new law that virtually acquiesces to rape among married couple is symptomatic of the medievalism that has ruled Afghanistan for so long. The new law, signed by President Hamid Karzai, has a provision that says, "a wife is obliged to fulfill the sexual desires of her husband." Although the law is specific to the Shi’a Muslims, who constitute 15 percent of the population, its very existence tells us how regressive Afghanistan remains. No one should be surprised that when some 500 women came out to protest the law, they were met by a fierce and menacing mob over a thousand men, some of whom even pelted stones because they supported the law.

Ayatollah Mohammed Asef Mohseni, the brain behind the law, told Reuters that "If a woman says no, the man has the right not to feed her."

Coming back to the question of the plight of widows in Afghanistan, the practice of mistreating them sits well with the new law in so much as both stem from a misogynistic view of life. So while your husband was alive you could run the risk of being raped or starved in case you did not want sex and after his death you could be begging on the streets running the risk of being molested. What a choice!?*%#

Turning to Hindi cinema to resolve AfPak mess

Amitabh Bachchan in 'Khuda Gawah'

Washington, April 1: Brushing aside ridicule by his own special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan U.S. President Barack Obama has decided to employ the "reach and charms" Hindi movie stars to help him resolve conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a White House memo that was accidentally emailed to this news site's editor reveals.

Obama's strategy of riding on the extraordinary popularity of Indian movie stars was said to have first taken hold in his mind during a couple of modest fundraisers by the Indian American community in Chicago on April 1, 2008. A year down the line what began as a conversation punctuated with laughter may turn out to be the cornerstone of the US policy in the world's most volatile region.

The memo records the utter disbelief expressed by Obama's AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrook who was so taken aback by the proposal that he said, "WTF? You can't be serious." A highly privileged source close to such out-of-the-box White House meetings told The Subcontinent, "The way Richard said "You can't be serious" sounded so much like John McEnroe. I shudder to think what might have happened if had a tennis racket with him."

The source also revealed that the new policy was to be announced on April 1, 2009, exactly a year after it was first suggested. "But given that the president is attending the G20 summit and also given the reputation that the day has worldwide we have decided to do so on the president's return," the source said.

"President Obama particularly mentioned Ameeta Bashaan (the source mimicked Obama's pronunciation of India's biggest movie icon Amitabh Bachchan) who is not just treated as a national icon in Afghanistan but whose movie "Khuda Gawah" (God as Witness) in which he played an Afghani turned him into a mythical figure. I think Bachchan might play a crucial part in this whole policy," the source said.

After the early conversations the source did try his hardest to dissuade The Subcontient from publishing the story. But in the interest of news the story is being published on April 1, 2009.

Although the memo is quite cryptic, The Subcontinent has pieced together some salient points of the new AfPak approach.

Hindi cinema (the president does not like to call it Bollywood) has the kind of power in the region that must be put to use for a much larger global cause.

Discreetly set up a task force under Amitabh Bachchan to study long-term soft/cultural diplomacy.

As a first step invite some of the biggest Hindi cinema names for a Camp David summit in May. (The list of names is being worked on but actor Shah Rukh Khan, who has some Afghan connection features prominently.)

President Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should discuss this approach privately on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

A late update by our source said after much recrimination Holbrook had agreed to watch Bachchan's "Khuda Gawah" and interpret the "subliminal undercurrent" in the movie's plot. 

"April 1, 2009 will go down as a historic date. New generations will no longer see it as April Fool's day," the source said, his tongue firmly in his cheek.

Can't love him, can't leave him

The Guardian reports that “the US and its European allies are preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.”

“The creation of a new chief executive or prime ministerial role is aimed at bypassing Karzai. In a further dilution of his power, it is proposed that money be diverted from the Kabul government to the provinces. Many US and European officials have become disillusioned with the extent of the corruption and incompetence in the Karzai government, but most now believe there are no credible alternatives, and predict the Afghan president will win re-election in August,” Julian Borger and Ewan MacAskill report.

The plan to checkmate Karzai has apparently been blessed by US President Barack Obama. It is obvious that the plan does not just bypass Karzai as an individual. It bypasses Afghanistan’s sovereignty, or whatever is left of it. The report says that the new parallel power center will be an Afghan figure. Planting a European or an American will be too brazen.

The primary job of the new person would be to channel large sums of money that the Afghan government receives in foreign aid directly to the provinces rather than the Karzai cabinet members acting as middlemen. Corruption in Kabul has reached a level where the US and Europe can no longer trust the Karzai government. This is as absurd a situation as it can get.

The West no longer loves Karzai and is unable to leave him. On his part Karzai has rejected the plan saying, “Afghanistan will never be a puppet state.” Would he please explain what else Afghanistan has been since the US invasion in the aftermath of 9/11?

Extreme isolation is only solution to Afghanistan-Pakistan

The beheading of a Polish geological engineer, Piotr Stanczak by one of the many mutations of the Taliban tells the rest of the civilized world yet again how irremediable that region has become. The more I think about it the more it strikes me that there are only two ways to deal with the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine—either extreme isolation or extreme engagement.

One common requirement to both the approaches is that they have to be taken to their absolute extreme. Extreme engagement would necessarily require total and remorseless annihilation of those who together constitute this movement of pure hatred. Since extreme engagement will be by its very nature inhuman on a scale that those against whom it is being waged cannot even begin to imagine it is not a practical approach. Hence it must be abandoned.

That leaves us with extreme isolation. This will require the international community, which chooses to follow basic decency and civility in the conduct of its own affairs, to come together and impose total physical isolation of Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas as well as perhaps the rest of Afghanistan. Whether those living inside this quarantined region want to pursue a lifestyle of 2009 or 1609 should be entirely their choice as long as it remains hermitically confined to the area. They can live by the cruelly obscurantist tenets of whichever religious system they are comfortable with. The rest of the world should display no interest whatsoever in reforming them with one clear caveat – the day they try to export any element of their lifestyle elsewhere they will be eliminated.

Cultures evolve in a certain way because a critical mass of people chooses to find common interests, beliefs and lifestyles around which a collective identity can coalesce and then they do their best to preserve that identity. In Afghanistan’s case, and to a great extent in the case of certain parts of Pakistan, a critical mass of people has accepted and internalized a way of life that coincides with what the Taliban-Al-Qaeda stands for. It may be misogynist and even misanthropic but that is the choice the people of that region has made. If the Afghanis or the tribal populations disapproved of such a way of life, they would have rejected it a long time ago. In the absence of any concerted movement against brutal medievalism, I am left with no choice but to conclude that that’s the way they want it. Or at least that’s the way they have accepted their lives to be.

Extreme isolation is obviously not an ideal solution but since nothing else seems to be work and we do not have the natural instinct to impose extreme engagement that is the only way out. Let no international aid flow to the region and no cultural exchange ensue unless the people of the region in their collective wisdom root out the Taliban-Al Qaeda from their midst once and for all. It is hard to believe that a region which prides itself as being the graveyard of empires cannot find enough brave people to wipe out the Taliban-Al Qaeda on their own. The only explanation is that they do not particularly mind the Taliban-Al Qaeda defining their lives. 

Afghan solution: Warlords with hard-ons

A hard-on lasting four hours or more is exactly what Afghan warlords needed. The Washington Post’s Jobby Warrick has a terrific story today on how the CIA is plying Afghan warlords with Viagra as an incentive to be on America’s side.

It is hard to decide where to start on this story. The first most obvious question is whom do these warlords call in case their erection lasts for more than four hours? Do they call the CIA officers who supplied the pill? Or do they just wait till it subsides whenever it does? Or do they call Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahari to brag? It is a good thing that some of these men have four wives.

Have these warlords been warned that there are side effects to pleasure? They are listed as headache, facial flushing and upset stomach. I am not even going into the challenge of balancing an upset stomach with full arousal.

Apparently the Company is careful to ensure that Viagra is given to older warlords whose appetite might be dwindling amid a pile of all those bazookas. They are permanently surrounded penile symbols and often forget which is their own and which is from Russia or America.

In a country where guns are often a manifestation of male libido, it is a great idea to pump up warlords with Viagra. It seems some of the warlords who received the pill performed their tasks for the CIA much better than before. A satisfied warlord is all that we need to resolve the Afghan problem.

Read the WaPo story here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/25/AR2008122500931.html?hpid=topnews

Arming Afghan militias, again

Dexter Filkins in The New York Times has a disturbing report about how United States and Afghan commanders are planning to arm local militias to take on the reinvigorated Taliban. The idea replicates what the US commanders did in Iraq where some 100,000 Sunni fighters were lured over to the government side with arms and money.

Essentially, what is going on in both these countries (or at least one of them, namely Iraq, is still a country) is that tribes are being pitted against tribes with heavy infusion of Western weapons in the hope that the ‘good guys’ will eventually defeat the ‘bad guys.’ Apart from being pretty dimwitted, this approach also highlights how the world can no longer tell who is bad and who is good in these battles.

There is a compelling verse from a ghazal that goes “Kuchch dushmani ka dhab hai na ab dosti ke taur, Donon ka ek ranga hua tere sheher mein (There is neither method in enmity, nor norms in friendship. They are hard to tell apart in your city). The verse may not apply perfectly to what is going on in Afghanistan but it comes pretty close to it.

All this comes amid reports that the Afghan government is trying to get the Taliban to agree to peace talks. The Taliban is, of course, rejecting such overtures, perhaps in the fond hope that India might attack Pakistan to retaliate against the Mumbai terror strikes. That in turn would divert Pakistani military assets to the Kashmir/Punjab/Rajasthan/Gujarat border and consequently ease up pressure on them.

I am not sure if there is clear comprehension of how deeply geopolitics of the region is determined by the contiguous nature of South Asia. Mumbai, Karachi and Kabul are not as far apart as they may sound for each to affect the other.