A Thousand Terrible Twilights

Seven-and-a-half years after the removal of the Taliban, the feeling is of a city increasingly under siege
Aunohita Mojumdar Kabul

In capital Kabul, every week sees new cement bollards in front of buildings, fresh barbed wire concertinas strung across roads, new check points and road blocks. Each successive bomb blast in front of an important building, that is, buildings housing important people, sees yet another road being blocked to the Afghan public. The international community and elite Afghans barricade themselves behind more sandbags as ordinary Afghans get squeezed more and more into the remaining open areas of the capital.

Seven-and-a-half years after the removal of the Taliban, the feeling is of a city increasingly under siege. This fact made it all the more curious when the Director General of Afghanistan's National Security Directorate, Amrullah Saleh, claimed this week. "We are victorious." Making a speech at a security seminar, he asked: "What more victory do you want?"

Saleh explained his contention:  the world had finally come around to accepting the Afghan government's claim that the source of insecurity lay beyond Afghanistan's borders. Finally, he said, the battle had been taken to the place where those centres existed.Saleh was referring to the recent formulation of an 'Af-Pak' policy by the Barack Obama administration and its attention on Pakistan as a source of terror.

It is an approach that has gone down well with the governments of both Afghanistan as well as India, both of whom view it as a triumph of their diplomatic efforts. Officials of both countries are, however, less clear on how the Obama administration intends to act upon this understanding and how this will play into their strategies.

Within Afghanistan the mood is a somber one - of waiting. Opinion across the spectrum is agreed only on one thing: that the fresh influx of US troops will mean intensified fighting as the winter snows melt allowing for easier access across the rugged terrain.
For Afghan citizens the war against terror being waged in their territory in their name is not the only source of violence. While there is intense fighting between pro and anti-government elements in many of the southern and south eastern provinces, violence against citizens comes from multiple sources.

In Balkh province, governor Mohammad Atta, a former northern alliance commander, overlooks a province that has eradicated poppy and has been free of insurgency. However, he knows he sits on a powder keg. Balkh was hit by a severe drought last year and its dry brown fields point to the failure of crop. Economic deprivation could upset the fragile balance pushing people to re-enter poppy cultivation and destabilise the modicum of law and order that has been achieved.

In capital Kabul, its elite live in fear of kidnappings. While kidnappings in the city are usually followed by reports of the approaching spectre of the Taliban, the reality is that they are carried out by criminal networks looking for ransom - a get rich quick scheme that is made lucrative by the absence of an effective law and order machinery. Part of the problem of policing Afghanistan has been the use of police in counter insurgency duties for which they are ill-equipped. Between 2007 and 2009, 568 Afghan National Army soliders were killed compared to 1,504 policemen in the same period.