US
Imposed Democracy
In Afghanistan
By Mike
Head
World
Socialist Website
09 January 2004
After
more than three weeks of cajoling, back-room haggling and standover
tactics, the 502 largely unelected delegates to the United States-orchestrated
loya jirga, or grand tribal council, in Afghanistan this week endorsed
a constitution aimed at strengthening the crumbling position of Washingtons
handpicked interim president, Hamid Karzai.
Following intense
arm-twisting of faction leaders by US President George Bushs envoy
and ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and UN special envoy
Lakhdar Brahimi, the assemblya huge tent full of representatives
of warlords, mullahs and outright US stoogesrubber-stamped a constitution
on January 4.
While media reports
presented the outcome as a triumph for democracy, the assembly was a
travesty from start to finish. Karzai selected 50 of the delegates,
while the various militia, religious and ethnic elites that have been
complicit in the US-led military occupation, chose the others. Amid
growing resistance to the puppet regime, they could only meet under
armed guard. Even then, the proceedings were threatened by a series
of rocket attacks on the site, including one last weekend.
Perhaps the most
revealing moment came when Malalai Joya, a 26-year-old female social
worker from the rural province of Farah, stood up to condemn most of
the jirgas committee chairmen as criminals. Instead of being given
influential positions, she declared, they should be tried for their
crimes. Joya was initially thrown out of the meeting, then allowed to
remain and is now under UN protection from death threats.
The crimes to which
she referred were the widespread rocket shellings, torture, rape and
mass killings of civilians committed by Islamic fundamentalist warlordsmujahideen,
or holy warriorsfrom 1992 to 1996 before they were ousted by the
Taliban extremists. The US and its allies are today relying upon the
same thugs to rule Afghanistan. One of the most prominent delegates
was General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose Northern Alliance forces massacred
thousands of Taliban prisoners in the desert near Mazar-i-Sharif during
the US invasion in November 2001.
So anti-democratic
was the entire process that no vote was even taken on the final version
of the document. Instead, at the urging of the chairman, most of those
present simply stood briefly to signify their acceptance. Just three
days earlier, the meeting had been suspended in disarray when some 40
percent of the delegates boycotted the first and only vote at the gathering.
Led by former president
Burhanuddin Rabbani, the coalition of minority ethnic factions, including
his Tajik clan, Uzbeks and Hazaras, called for the appointment of a
prime minister to restrict the sweeping powers allocated to the president.
They also demanded official recognition of minority languages and called
for a ban on ministers holding dual citizenship. The latter provision
was primarily directed at those in Karzais camp who are US citizens.
Once Khalilzad and
Brahimi stepped in to lay down the law, Rabbani and his allies quickly
acceded to an autocratic presidency. The president will rule without
a prime minister. He will have the power to appoint and dismiss ministers,
key officials, judges and military, police and intelligence chiefs,
as well as one-third of the upper house of the national assembly. He
will be the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and can declare states
of emergency for the whole or parts of the country.
In return, Karzai
and his backers made minor concessions. They added a second vice president
to represent minority interests and gave the national assembly the right
to approve some presidential appointments. Alongside the two official
languages, Pashto (spoken by ethnic Pashtuns) and Dari (Tajik), other
languages will be recognised in regions where they are spoken by a majority
of people. Apparently, Karzai agreed to learn Uzbek. There will no ban
on dual citizenship, but the national assembly can reject individual
officials who hold foreign passports.
Karzai also struck
a deal with hard-line Islamic fundamentalists to include a clause prohibiting
any law from offending Islam. This means that, despite the lip service
paid by the constitution to democratic rights, including equal status
for women, reactionary Islamic precepts will prevail. Karzai had already
appointed Fazal Hadi Shinwari as chief justice of the Supreme Court.
In violation of the constitution, Shinwari is over the age limit and
has training only in religious, not secular, law.
He is an ally of
the pro-Wahhabi, Saudi-backed fundamentalist leader Ustad Abdul Rasul
Sayyaf, who was a committee chairman in the loya jirga. Shinwari has
packed the Supreme Court with sympathetic mullahs, called for Taliban-style
punishments and brought back the Talibans dreaded Ministry for
the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, renamed the Ministry
of Haj and Religious Affairs. It deploys squads to stop public displays
of un-Islamic behaviour among Afghan women.
Presidential elections
are meant to be held under the new constitution by June, to be followed
by assembly elections. But the deteriorating economic and security situation
in the country makes that schedule unlikely. UN envoy Brahimi has already
told the New York Times that assembly elections would be well
nigh impossible because the threat of Taliban insurgents make
large parts of the country inaccessible.
For his part, Rabbani
has made it plain that the conflicts that wracked the loya jirga have
by no means receded. He declared that the backroom dictates issued in
Kabul had only damaged the administrations credibility and warned
that the strong presidential system could push Afghanistan to
a dictatorship.
Despite the deeply
reactionary character of the gathering in Kabul, UN secretary-general
Kofi Annan praised the outcome as an historic achievement. President
Bush welcomed the constitution, declaring that a democratic Afghanistan
will serve the interests and just aspirations of all the Afghan people.
The major media
outlets, including the erstwhile liberal press, dutifully echoed these
remarks. The New York Times editorial called the constitution enlightened
and said the Bush administration was justifiably thrilled by the
outcome. It endorsed ongoing US military control of the country,
to help provide the political support and military security to
make presidential and parliamentary elections possible.
No democracy
To even speak of
democracy in these circumstances is farcical. Washington has illegally
conquered one of the most impoverished and ruined countries on earth,
overturned its government and joined hands with notorious butchers to
repress and intimidate the population. Around 12,000 US-led combat troops
remain in Afghanistan, terrorising the population in the name of hunting
down Taliban and Al Qaeda supporters. They are accompanied by 5,700
NATO peacekeepers, which are mainly propping up the Karzai
administration in the capital.
Even the timetable
for elections in Afghanistan is driven by the Bush administrations
immediate domestic political considerations. It badly needs a symbolic
show of success for its war on terror in the lead-up to
the US presidential election in November. It is proceeding with its
characteristic mixture of cynicism and short-sightedness. All that matters
in Afghanistan is a public relations victory, regardless of the completely
catastrophic reality.
Many parts of the
country are no longer safe for allied troops, or for that matter, UN
officials, aid workers and ordinary civilians. Mounting guerilla attacks
have forced international aid agencies to withdraw to Kabul, halting
even elementary welfare efforts. On December 18, the World Food Program
admitted that its food distribution program had been severely affected
by the breakdown in security.
The deteriorating
situation was highlighted on January 6, when a truck bomb blast near
a military base in the southern city of Kandahar killed at least 16
people and wounded 52, many of them school children. Despite the indiscriminate
terror employed by the insurgents, the methods being employed by the
US seem to be simply increasing support for the Taliban fundamentalists.
Heavy-handed repression
by US troops is intensifying popular opposition and resistance to the
occupation, particularly in the southern and eastern Pashtun regions.
Last month, the US military launched its largest operations in Afghanistan
since the overthrow of the Taliban, aimed at tracking down anti-government
forces and quelling wider unrest in the lead-up to the loya jirga.
Karzais fiefdom
is largely confined to Kabul, where US troops guard him around the clock.
Elsewhere, private armies roam, with a total of half a million men under
arms, some linked to drug barons and others to members of Karzais
government.
There is no prospect
that even the semblance of a democratic regime will emerge in Afghanistan
under these hellish and neo-colonial conditions. Democracy is only possible
through a genuine popular revolution, spearheaded by the working class,
throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Only such a movement could
liberate the region from decades of great power domination and overcome
its legacy of economic backwardness, warlordism and theocratic oppression.