Afghanistan's Long Road to Reconstruction

Sweltering in the noonday sun outside Herat’s grand Friday Mosque last May 20, I was excited to see democracy (of a sort) in action in western Afghanistan. Local dignitaries and members of the Loya Jirga (Grand Council) Commission addressed a crowd of more than six-hundred Afghans who had turned out to cast ballots in Phase I of their newly liberated country’s two-stage voting process. In this first phase, they would choose members of the Loya Jirga, whose meeting a few weeks later would select Hamid Karzai as president of an 18-month Transitional Administration. As one of a handful of international monitors present for the Loya Jirga balloting, I too gave a short speech, telling the soon-to-be-voters that the whole world was watching Afghanistan, and that any of them who had a complaint could come to me, as a representative of the international community. I have since been struck by the irony of my well-meaning remarks, which I delivered with great sincerity at various Phase I polling places in western Afghanistan. In truth, it would have been fairer for the Afghans to have told me, as a representative of the international community, that it was Afghanistan’s 27 million people who would be watching us—watching and wondering if the world would stay involved this time and help their country to rebuild itself. My Afghan hosts were too polite to say any such thing, of course, but in fact Afghanistan desperately needs the substantial and committed involvement of the international community, especially the United States, if it is to have any hope of breaking out of the national deathtrap that more than two decades of ceaseless warfare have created. Larry Goodson, professor of Middle East Studies at the U.S. Army War College, is the author of Afghanistan’s Endless War: State Failure, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban (2000). In the spring and summer of 2002, he was a consultant to the Afghan Loya Jirga that chose Hamid Karzai as first president of the new republic of Afghanistan.