THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Compiled By A. David Dahmer

• Afghan Peace Elusive

JALALABAD, Afghanistan (IPS/GIN) — War-devastated Afghanistan enters 2004 with the prospect of its first democratic elections in June 2004, after the draft of a new constitution is in place. But to many, lasting peace looks like a distant or impossible dream.

Sitting in his tiny mud-made shop in a suburb of Jalalabad, the capital of eastern Nangarhar province, trader Mohammad Rehman looks and sounds hopeless about peace more than two years after the United States ousted the Taliban in November 2001.

“Our [country] came out of the Soviet occupation in the late ‘80s, only to go under the occupation of another world power,” Rehman said, without naming the United States. "It seems our commanders and 'maliks,' or village leaders, are used to war. They don't know what peace is and what its fruits are."

The psyche of the Afghan people might also have changed drastically during years of conflict, Rehman mused. The thought of peace has become alien to people used to hearing gunshots and tanks rolling in the streets and over their mud-made habitats, he says. "Now we are falling prey to the aerial bombardment of cluster bombs by the fighter jets of the coalition forces stationed in Afghanistan," Rehman said. There has been no change in the situation, just a change in the technology of the warfare, Rehman said, listening to a Pashto-language news bulletin on his portable radio.

Ghonde, a labourer, says that people continue to feel alienated from the affairs of the state even under the government of President Hamid Karzai. "Yes, we do admit that Taliban policies had also somehow kept the public at bay from the affairs of the state. But what is the actual position today?" he asked, sitting in a bazaar without the work he needs to feed his eight-member family for the day.

"It will be too hard for peace to find its way here, at least in a short span of a year or two," added Muhammad Jalali, a farmer who disclosed that he had sown opium poppies on his agricultural land to make ends meet.

In the post-Taliban era, most parts of the country, including the capital, Kabul, have witnessed an upsurge in lawlessness as well as the re-emergence of ethnic divisions sown by years of conflict. Aid workers have come under attack. Opium production accounts for nearly half the gross domestic product, and the country will need U.S. $30 billion in aid and investment over the next five years.

The Karzai government has no or very little authority outside the capital. It remains heavily dependent for security on foreign, including U.S., troops, while warlords outside Kabul have been refusing to turn over revenues to the central government.

"We need to deal with the security issue, and if we do not deal with that, we may lose Afghanistan," U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has said. "Without security, you cannot have effective reconstruction."

Some believe that the holding of loya jirga, or grand assembly, to discuss a new constitution — which is nearing an end after weeks of debates about whether Afghanistan should have a presidential or parliamentary form of government — will be futile if it does not address tensions among different ethnic and political groups. The ratification of the new constitution will pave the way for the 2004 vote.

“Over 80 percent of jirga's delegates are those whose interests could be better served and nourished in continued warfare and not in peace," the same intellectual added. "After the Taliban's alienation and its subsequent fall, let us now alienate the warlords, the so-called commanders and tribal chiefs. This is the only panacea for all the crippling ills of over 20 years," the intellectual said. — Fida Hussain

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