By Mohammed Ousta
When will the West perceive that occupation and democracy never go together?
What a farce! Can it get any better than this? Hamid Karzai appears to be inching toward victory in yet another "democratic election".
In the latest update, Afghan election commission has put Karzai's vote share at 56 percent, which seems to have come as a bit of shock to the coalition of the willing. They had been hoping to dump Karzai and move on with another "moderate and democratic leader", Abdullah Abdullah. The West's disappointment over Abdullah's flop shows despite all the help he got from friends in high places is most comical. And Abdullah has turned on his former boss and ally to accuse him of stealing the election. The game resembles the one of Kurdistan parliamentary elections after loads of abusive reports indicating huge election fraud and irregularities yet the Iraqi High Electoral Commission (IHEC) declined to review the complaints. As matter of default, Barzani and Kurdistani List's votes were the achievement of their prevalent fraud trend! It seems again that Middle Eastern people can't stand performing single task with no irregularity and fraud like election.
Turning that leaf over, going back to Afghanistan, Abdullah should know after all he was part of the same clique not long ago. Ironically, for all this talk of stealing the election, this may have been the closest has come to a real election. Confronted with looming possibility of the wily Tajik, Abdullah, replacing Karzai, the Pashtun majority apparently rallied behind the president.
Karzai had never been a favorite option but pitted against Abdullah, he clearly looked attractive to his fellow-Pashtuns. However, America and its ever-obliging allies seem to have lost all interest in the pseudo-president of Kabul.
By repeatedly protesting- however mild and ineffective in nature, Against coalitions murderous attacks targeting innocent civilians and suggesting talks with the Taleban,. Karzai has raised the coalition's hackles. Besides, in their view, he has served his purpose and is already beyond his sell-by-date.
Apparently, Afghanistan needs another "leader" dancing to the tunes of Washington, London, Berlin and Rome. Karzai has become too independent and assertive for their linking. Not that I have any sympathy for Karzai, in fact, between him and Abdullah, the Afghans have as much as choice as between the devil and the deep blue sea. They are doomed either way, unlike Kurdistan's elections which enjoyed presidential candidates of highly moral and academic background like Dr. Kamal Mirawdali, who the West's "democracy" victimized his votes and endorsed ideal ear-lender of Washington of Kurdistan.
When will the coalition muster the courage to face the reality in Afghanistan; this is a doomed war and a doomed mission to make a Japan out of Afghanistan, a haven of “Western democracy".
Nothing they do will ever succeed in Afghanistan, because the problem is not with ineffectual angels like Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah or with Afghan people. The problem lies with the coalition itself. Desperately you try and bend over backward to justify this whole charade; this is still an unjust war and invasion. This is still the occupation. No election under occupation however free, fair and all jazz-can be considered democratic. “Tyranny is the nature of occupation, verily US and coalition forces are among them undoubtedly” said Nuraddin, 32 years old Afghan mathematician who I ran into earlier this month in Macca.
I am all for democracy and share Churchill's belief that, despite of all its flaws, this remains as best form of governance discovered so far. And I don't believe in Bunkum either that democracy is ill suited for the Muslim world. But if you call what Afghanistan is being subjected to right now democracy, then I must be Albert Einstein. My question to the global audience, how can a people, enslaved and in chains, exercise their constitutional and democratic right freely under the shadow of the gun?
As someone had said, democracy is a fragile seed: if you want to take root, don't plant it in a hurricane. How can you expect a people to vote with their hearts and minds when they are dying in hundreds each week in air-strikes and bombings?
An airstrike after deadly and Air-strike attacks that spare no on, not even weddings and funerals and leave nothing but the rancid smell to cordite in the air. Last month, after a coalition strike in Kunduz killed nearly a hundred people. US Stanley McChrystal went on Afghan TV to placate the angry Afghans and promise probe into the "incident". I wonder whatever happened to all those probes and inquiries ordered in the past into similar, "regrettable incidents". Has anyone been taken to task for such attacks on the past? One hasn’t heard of even the mildest of routine, disciplinary action against the trigger-happy liberators of Afghanistan.
For the war on Iraq is as unfair and unjust as the one next-door in Afghanistan. It might not have been preceded by monumental lies and deception, as had been case with Iraq. With the US hopping mad and demanding blood after the 9/11 catastrophe, the rest of the world nodded in sympathy and questioning acquiescence when it decided to bomb Afghanistan back to where it belonged, the stone age. No one has courage to turn around and ask what right the US had to invade Afghanistan and lodge its handpicked men by driving out an existing, functioning government.
Even the United Nations went along by putting its seal of approval on the invasion. But eight years after 9/11, it is not time to ask what the coalition has achieved in Afghanistan?
If it was war against Al-Qaeda, as we were once assured, then it is not there in Afghanistan anymore. It is the Taleban and ordinary Afghans that the coalition is fighting now. And if is this year against Afghans and their country, then let me assure president Obama that the US has a long and endless war on its hands. I know we have been here before. But if history is any indication, the coalition could fight the Afghans a thousand years and yet return empty handed, and utterly defeated.
As James Fergusson, the author of "A million bullets : The real story of the British army in Afghanistan", wrote in ‘The Independent’, quoting a Taleban commander, ordinary Afghans hate war but they see the current struggle as "a jihad against foreign aggressors".
And when they see it as Jihad and their moral obligation to fight the occupation, they will never give up their fight. "One year, a hundred years, a million years it doesn't matter!" said Faridullah Ahmed, another resistive Afghan who I met in Makkah about 10 days ago.
How can you fight and win with such an enemy holding such a slogan? I hate to bat for the Taleban or former Iraqi regime. But talking to the resistance may be the only forward for the coalition, if they want to leave Afghanistan and Iraq with their dignity sound and intact. There's another option: just get the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq then let Afghans and Iraqis sort out their mess themselves. This is what the British and Russian did in Afghanistan and Iraq decades ago. This is what Americans will eventually have to do!
Mohammed Ousta is youth activist, freelance junior journalist based in Kurdistan-Iraq m_omer1991@yahoo.com
