A group of tribal elders walk past razor wire
surrounding a police compound in Mirabad, Uruzgan province
As Australian troops pack up to quit Afghanistan, fears of a
new era of warlord violence and tribal domination are taking hold in Oruzgan
province, where locals say that Canberra's efforts to import democracy have
failed.
Despite efforts by the Australian Defence Force to block it,
Fairfax Media spent 10 days in Oruzgan in late January, interviewing tribal
elders, businessmen and government figures and talking with ordinary Afghans
about what had been achieved in the past decade and how they believed the next
10 years might unfold. Over the coming week, in a major series, we will tell
their stories - uncensored.
For all of the boosterism in Canberra and Washington, what
emerges is a near-total disregard for the West's efforts to foster a
parliamentary democracy. Instead, the locals look to multi-millionaire police
chief Matiullah Khan and other warlord figures, fearful of the violence by
which they rule their turf, but seemingly resigned to an acceptance that the
new Afghanistan is very much like the old Afghanistan - a chronically corrupt
society in which the first language is violence; and in which the best militia,
not the best argument, wins the day.
Despite an obsessive focus by the Australians and their
coalition colleagues on the Taliban, there is as much or even more alarm among
Afghans over the inordinate power of tribal elders and the resort to violence
by a brutal warlord class, which they say has been resurrected by the same
Western powers who claimed to be bringing democracy to their ravished homeland.
All eyes are on the Australian-backed Matiullah, a new-age
warlord who is positioning a well-armed personal strike force to fend off what
key community figures warn will be inevitable challenges to his one-man
government.
''What is [Matiullah], if there are no Americans, no
Australians,'' asks a business leader as he criticised foreign support for
Matiullah, who is accused of undermining and over-charging the government he is
supposed to serve.
''The day the foreigners leave, his own men will kill him -
they'll be lining up to take Matiullah down.''
Local leaders and analysts say a cardinal sin by the US-led
coalition for which Australia signed on under prime minister John Howard, was
to back a clean sweep of virtually all key provincial government positions by
members of President Hamid Karzai's Popalzai tribe, creating deep-seated
resentment in three bigger tribes.
Arguing that all power had been vested in the Popalzai, Nabi
Khan, an elder of the bigger Ghilzai tribe, warns: ''As long as we have this
imbalance, there will be no security in Oruzgan.''
Reducing the challenge to a simple equation, an analyst with
top-level access to coalition operations, says: ''There were four things to do
- counter corruption, contain abuse and reconcile the people to living with
each other. There's not been much progress on those three.
''But on the fourth, counterinsurgency, we've been great -
we've destroyed the insurgency three times over, and every time it's come back
because we haven't done the first three things we had to do.''
The Australians and their coalition colleagues cite
staggering cases in which the Australians have been taken for a ride - in one
instance, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a mosque that is barely
used; and more generally, in detaining 1000 or more ''innocent'' locals who had
been dobbed in as ''suspected insurgents'' by disgruntled tribal and business
rivals.
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