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Afghanistan : Revival of Virtue and Vice Dept. |
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In recent weeks, the West-backed Government of President Hamid Karzai has moved aggressively to crack down on what Afghans call imported vices. He is acting partly in response to pressure from domestic religious leaders and partly to upstage Islamic Taliban insurgents who are stepping up attacks across the south.
The Cabinet approved reviving the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Discouragement of Vice, a body that Afghan governments have maintained through much of the country’s history. It became notoriously punitive under Taliban rule, from 1996 to 2001, when turbaned enforcers whipped women if their veils slipped and arrested men for wearing too-short beards or playing chess. The proposal, which must be ratified by Parliament, has outraged human rights groups, Western-oriented Afghan leaders and Western diplomats in Kabul because of the concept’s association with the Taliban. Afghan officials have hastened to reassure their international allies that the reconstituted vice and virtue squads would focus on education.
Police in Kabul which is also home to several thousand foreigners, have raided about a dozen restaurants and shops suspected of selling alcohol to Afghans and have seized and destroyed thousands of bottles. Officers have detained more than 100 Chinese women as suspected prostitutes, seven of whom were deported.
NATO induction: Dangerous task ahead
Meanwhile, on August 1, there was an important security development in Afghanistan. By inducting an additional 8,000 troops in six southern provinces of Afghanistan, the NATO extended its security operations in what is considered to be the most challenging mission in its 57-year-old history. Achieving stability in war-ravaged Afghanistan has been a major effort ever since the fall of the Taliban in November 2001. Although the US-led coalition forces (about 19,000 troops) and NATO’s 10,000-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have succeeded in achieving some stability in the north and west, the security environment is deteriorating in the south and east. Over 1,000 civilians have been killed in the insurgency this year - nearly half of them in May when Kabul witnessed the worst rioting in its recent history. Most of the violence occurred in the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandhar and Uruzgan, the region from where the Taliban rose to take control of nearly 80 per cent of the country. That area continues to see the worst of the insurgency. On July 20, the British commander of the ISAF, Lt. Gen. David Richards, talking at the Royal United Services Institute, London, described the situation in Afghanistan as “close to anarchy”. In an interview, he said NATO forces were involved in some of the worst and most prolonged fighting since World War II.
The problem is that the Afghan Government and the ISAF have neither the capacity to disarm all these groups nor the ability to fill a security void that such large-scale disarmament would create. A possible answer could be to absorb benign militias into the provincial police, and to deal pro-actively with those indulging in narcotics smuggling and other criminal offences. Poppy production and drugs make up more than half of Afghanistan’s $7 billion economy. Opium is the only commodity in which Afghanistan is globally competitive. The counter-narcotics strategy hasn’t had much success, because the sector drives the country’s political economy. Until the Afghans see a meaningful improvement in their lives, the country will remain unstable. Lastly, there are no indications of an exit strategy by the US/NATO forces. External military forces can reduce armed violence, create space for non-violent political competition and can act as a catalyst for development. But ultimately they will have to leave and, therefore, must have a clear exit strategy. The assumption is that once the coalition forces and NATO achieve adequate security for the local government and NGOs to work safely, the military will withdraw. On the ground, however, there is little policy co-ordination between international agencies, NGOs and the military. Afghanistan is famous for being a fatal whirlpool for external adversaries as well as for friendly partners.
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