“Khak” is Afghan for dirt. The soil is pulverized to dust in Kabul, beaten down by the bare feet of millions of refugees, milling back in droves to complete a story, abandoned once again to the latest plunderers. The loot of warlords, of their guns-for-drugs trade doesn’t trickle down far here except to sluice in the back-channeled veins of criminals clothed as religious clerics we’ve carefully cultivated, armed and trained over two decades ago, rallying to the call of a Jihad manufactured under the Reagan Doctrine, to burry the Russians in their very own Vietnam.
Those same warlords, who hunkered for power in the void of the Soviet pullout, hurling rockets from the hillsides for years in the early nineties, holding Kabul hostage, pounding the city with impunity, left in their wake the remains of 50,000 civilians on the city streets, their ruthlessness rivaled only by the Taliban who came to follow. Flanked by private armies and private jails now, they continue to reign supreme today switching musical chairs as alternating cabinet level ministers of defense, of interior, of energy and are so strategically placed as to disburse the largesses of the latest $10 billion dollars’ worth of foreign aid to their drug trafficking efforts.
These are the drug lords we’ve struck a Faustian deal with in post Taliban Afghanistan. Through the rule of the gun and of the mighty dollar, these are the candidates who elbowed themselves to the forefront of the parliamentary elections we so proudly brought to the Afghans with our invasion. The country now has the unique distinction of producing ninety two percent of the world’s opium supply, and cultivation has increased by one and a half times since last year at this time. It truly gives new meaning to Narco-democracy.
So much for the promises of reconstruction. So much for the long-awaited Afghan Marshall Plan. It never materialized. We were too busy invading Iraq. The flourishing drug trade is now the single biggest source of employment in the nation and makes up thirty five percent of the country’s economy. So much for “staying the course”…
Five years later, the contracts that could have employed millions of Afghans in rebuilding their economy were handed over without bids to American corporate carpetbaggers, with abysmal results. It is now well documented that corporations such as Halliburton, Kellogg Brown & Root, and the Louis Berger group have had huge cost overruns and little to show for the contracts they’ve obtained in such places as Afghanistan, Iraq and New Orleans after Katrina.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan American stooge, has played a largely honorary role these past 5 years as titular head of the nation. He has seen what little power he has in the capital eroded by the regional warlords he appeases in exchange, but he sure dresses the part. He’s been a colorful addition to the Bush marketing strategy, standing beside our imponderable leader, beaming gratitude, during the obligatory “State of the Union” addresses. But he has neither earned nor won the respect of the Afghans themselves. Nor do the convoys of his implanted Afghan dignitaries sitting pretty in Humvees or SUVs protected by DynCorp or Blackwater mercenaries sporting machine guns on the backs of trucks, inspire much confidence in the powers that be these days, as they race across the city in self-important daze.
As for the helpers, or should we call them apologists, those soft gloved diplomatic carrots, at any rate, to the military punishing sticks, also bestow their favors. Consultants’ fees pile on sky high to cook up more rounds of needs assessments, design culturally sensitive service delivery strategies to build up the capacity of their own pockets and present timid outcome measures to pad all the waste. Still, the funding was approved by donor nations in the throes of combat fatigue. For who is to say who is more deserving these days? Those in Darfur facing systemized genocide, the battered inhabitants of Banda Ace pounded by the waves, Pakistani families buried in the rubble of the latest earthquake? Iraqis?
No, you have to draw a line somewhere. Admittedly, we started that one too, but we are under no obligation to pay any restitution for the damage we’ve inflicted. It’s a small price to pay for free elections and democracy. Never mind that we’ve either knowingly or out of sheer ignorance driven such a wedge in the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish social fabric there, that we are now looking at a full-blown civil war. Not to worry, we’ve got a ready answer to this thorny problem. We’ll just carve up the country in three, deal directly with the Kurds who now have the lion’s share of the oil, and hand over the rest of Iraq to the ministerings of Iran and Syria… Yeee hah! Mission Accomplished, after all…
Or maybe the Lebanese could use some help just about now that they, too, have known what collective military rage unleashed could do while the United Empire sat back and watched the Israeli invasion from the sidelines this summer. But back to Afghanistan, where what is missing in action now are the billions of American dollars allocated to the Afghan people and appropriated by Congress for reconstruction, that have yet to find their targets. Not so the shock and awe of cluster bombings we unleashed when we invaded, so enticing to the children, but necessary collateral damage to rid the world of Osama and to free Afghan women. Half a decade later, Osama lives still, the lucky bastard or was it purely luck –who can say- of that narrow escape from Tora Bora into the Pakistani sheltering harbor. So much for the “track’em down, and smoke’em out” swaggering rhetoric. Just look at the end results.
Necessary too is the pinpoint precision of missiles coated with DU, the depleted uranium that allows for maximum perforation. A few years later, babies with birth defects emerge for brief and troubled glimpses of our restless earth before giving up and receding back into Khak, dust to dust. Kabul, the city, swollen purple, beats back the desert it has become. A brooding brown foam hovers stubbornly in the sullen clouds. The wastes of humans in open sewers, parched in the searing sun, mix with the acrid purr of gas generators, car exhaust and auto-immune exhaustion, as the wind howls in a dust bowl its supplication to heaven.
Khak… is Afghan for dust. The foothills surrounding the city are pockmarked with craters, the ghosts of trees felled for heat and stripped right down to their roots. The land is as barren as the women’s longing… for empty wombs, to stem the rhythms of babies birthing, babies dying. A unique distinction in these parts, the world’s record rates of suicide in women. Here again, fossil fuel is the predominant choice. Some stories just can’t bear digesting…