Afghanistan two years on...

[minega]

Two years on, has USA won the peace in Afghanistan? I have heard a lot of gloomy reports…that Karzai has little power outside the capital, that women have barely made any progress in achieving their rights, that the country is still in a constant state of war…just how bad is Afghanistan right now?Or is the bad news exaggerated?

[rjung]

If this is any indication, things aren’t too good over there:

Lessons from Afghanistan

A Human Rights Watch investigation backs Faryal’s analysis: one year after the Dec. 5, 2001, Bonn Agreement was signed, most regional warlords enjoyed greater power than before the United States-led military intervention, and that has only created more misery.

"About four million people are on the verge of starvation," Faryal reported. Afghans’ average life expectancy is 47 years. Infant mortality rates are high. Only one-quarter of newborns reach the age of five, and only 35 percent of Afghan children have access to school. Opium production has skyrocketed. In areas such as the western province of Herat, HRW found that women’s rights to work, get an education, and freely express themselves have actually deteriorated since the U.S. invasion.

Faryal says the failure to improve conditions in Afghanistan is a direct outcome of U.S. policies in the region. The United States, she explains, relied on local warlords to help oust Taliban forces and to secure access to the countryside to build a natural gas pipeline.

“Obviously [the Northern Alliance commanders] were promised something,” Faryal said. “You do that favor for us, and we’ll give you power.” During the Bonn process, U.S. support was crucial in guaranteeing Northern Alliance forces a strong voice in the peace deliberations. Now, “the most important positions were and are given to those who have had their hands heavily in the blood of the people and the destruction of the country,” Faryal said.

To be quite fair, I don’t think comparisons of a post-war Afghanistan and a post-war Iraq are fair – I don’t expect the United States government will forget about Iraq as quickly as it forgot about Afghanistan (anyone remember the $0 allocated for Afghanistan aid in the Bush budget?). But that’s only because Iraq’s sitting on all that lovely petroleum…