Tue, Aug 03, 2004 page9

• Afghanistan offers a glimmer of hope for US foreign policy

  • By Richard Halloran
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  In contrast to the quagmire into which Iraq appears to be sliding, there seems to be a glimmer of hope for success in Afghanistan, where US and other foreign forces continue to operate largely out of the public eye back home.

  Perhaps most telling, several million Afghans have voted with their feet and returned home from refugee camps in Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asia. Voter registration for a presidential election in October proceeds in a country where deciding by vote is not culturally ingrained. The fledgling Afghan National Army shows sparks of being willing to stand and fight.

  Provincial reconstruction teams of American and other foreign engineering, medical and civil affairs specialists are working with Afghans to get the economy restarted.

  Ground was broken last week on Afghanistan's first industrial park in which the initial tenant will be a Coca-Cola bottling plant. (If that symbol of modern life is not an encouraging sign, what is?) US troops are continuing to bear down on Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists.

  After Marines swept though what had been a Taliban stronghold, the ground commander in Afghanistan, Army Major General Eric Olson, told them: "`Never again can they use that place as a sanctuary."

  On the down side, Taliban extremists remain violent and are seeking to disrupt the coming election. Al-Qaeda terrorists led by Osama bin Laden, who is still at large, are struggling to take advantage of the turbulence caused by the Taliban. Warlords and militias remain an even more serious threat to the emerging central government.

  And the most productive trade in the economy is the growing of opium. A bumper crop is expected this year and its heroin derivative has already started flooding markets in the West.

  In sum, says a US military officer who has recently returned from Afghanistan: "It's a tenuous balance."

  The destruction of war has been part of Afghan life since the Third Century BC when Alexander the Great marched into Afghanistan. The Afghans have fought Huns, Persians, Mongols, Russians and the British. The Afghans finally drove the British out in 1921.

  The Russians invaded again in 1979 to fight a 10-year war in which they lost more than 40,000 soldiers. The human and financial costs of that conflict contributed to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  When they were not resisting foreign invaders, Afghans quar-reled among themselves; the last time they had anything resembling a unified country was early in the 19th century. Recently, the Taliban's emergence has been the foremost cause of disorder.

  Between the war with the Russians and the brutality of the Taliban, more than 5 million Afghans fled. Since US forces routed the Taliban in late 2001, some 2 million have returned from Pakistan and 900,000 from Iran.

  Another 500,000 displaced persons in Afghanistan itself have gone home. About 1.6 million refugees are still in Pakistan and 800,000 in Iran.

  Of the estimated 9.5 million eligible voters in Afghanistan, the UN says that 80 percent have registered so far. Of those, 40 percent are women, whom the Taliban fanatics forbade to work or go to school. The 2.3 million refugees in Pakistan and Iran will also be eligible to vote.

  The incumbent president, Hamid Karzai, and a powerful warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, are the most prominent contenders in a field of 23 candidates. If neither gets 50 percent of the votes on Oct. 9, a runoff will follow. Whether this experiment in governance will succeed remains to be seen.

  Although Karzai has begun to rein in the warlords, he says their armies are more of a threat to Afghanistan's future than the Taliban. "The frustration that we have in this country is that progress has sometimes been stopped by private militias, life has been threatened by private militias, so it should not be tolerated," he told The New York Times.

  A faint sign of Afghan recovery: There is talk of rebuilding the two massive Buddhist statues carved out of a mountainside 17 centuries ago, long before Islam came to Afghanistan, but dynamited by the Taliban three years ago.

  The governor of Bamiyan province, Mohammed Rahim Ali Yar, was quoted in the South Asian Media Net: "The Buddhas were a kind of symbol of our history and culture, something that introduced us to the world. We are less without them."

  Richard Halloran is a writer based in Honolulu.
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