# Posted 6:08 AM by Patrick Belton  

OXBLOG'S AFGHANISTAN CORRESPONDENT STRIKES AGAIN:

This time, our adventurous dashing hero experiments with Gorges and Guns

In the late morning, we passed through the town of Pul-e-Khumre and turned onto the road to Mazar. The road wound up from the broad, fertile lowlands of Baghlan into grassy, treeless hills. Half the terrain in Afghanistan seems to have been designed to facilitate ambushes, and the hill country of Samangan was no exception; every turn in the road brings you out underneath or facing some high vantage from which a surprise attack could be launched. The deep, curving creases between hills would allow easy getaways. As elsewhere, the littering of old tanks and truck frames along the roadside testified to the success of past guerrillas.

Descending from the hills, we saw the thick shadow of forests in the distance: the poplars and almond orchards of Samangan town. The recent brawling between militias in the area hasn't depressed a local construction boom; large new cement houses seemed to be going up all along the road into town. The local Ministry of Agriculture folks were gone, so we drove on to visit their counterparts an hour or so north. The forests and broad wheat fields gave way to a range of desert crags, which crept in on either side of the highway until suddenly we found ourselves driving into Tashqurgan Gorge.

The gorge is unbelievable -- a natural gap in the rock, barely wide enough for the road and a narrow river, with sheer cliffs shooting up hundreds of feet on either side. This natural gateway was hotly contested during the decades of war, and here for the first time I saw on the shoulder of the road the red-and-white-painted stones that indicate uncleared minefields (you're safe on the white side of the rocks, likely to lose a limb on the red side). Not thirty feet from the landmines, entrepreneurial Afghans have set up a half-dozen fruit stands catering to the travelers who stop to gawp at the gorge. We stopped, and gawped, and bought a lot of really tasty apricots.

On the far side of the gorge, the towering cliffs quickly descend to low clay outcrops, with a scattering of walled homes and scenic orchards along the river. These are the outskirts of Tashqurgan -- also known by its ancient name of Kholm, from the jolly old days when the Uzbek khanates of Kunduz and Kholm vied for supremacy of the steppe. Locals claim that eight hundred years ago, the plain was fertile and populous, and you could travel the many miles between Kholm and Mazar-e-Sharif by jumping rooftop to rooftop. Now there's just a thick ribbon of trees running north along the river from Tashqurgan, which like most rivers in northern Afghanistan is swallowed by the desert long before reaching the Amu Darya. The wasteland beyond is empty, oppressively featureless -- it's a palpable shock to drive out of the dramatic crags of Tashqurgan Gorge and suddenly face a completely empty horizon. The minute we drove down into the arid plains, swarms of locusts began hitting our windshield with heavy, wet splats.

We took lunch at a lone house in the desert, with representatives from a local farmers' association. Across the road, we saw a few dozen parked tanks and artillery pieces that looked much less derelict than the normal roadside wrecks. Asking our hosts about it, we found out that it was a DDR storage zone -- the "demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration" program, under which the government hopes to disarm 60 percent of Afghanistan's tens of thousands of irregular fighters before the September elections. This is a dauntingly huge project; billions of dollars of American money in the 1980s (and Saudi money over the last twenty-five years) bought a whole lot of weapons. Essentially, there was a time in Afghanistan when virtually anyone who wanted an automatic rifle could have one. That's a hard genie to coax back into the bottle.

The DDR program has enjoyed spotty successes. On May 5th, a local commander in Wardak province (just south of Kabul) reportedly surrendered over 200 heavy weapons and 600 light weapons to the authorities. Local farmers in the same area complained to news reporters that the DDR program is taking away the means to defend their land, which I take to be a good sign -- DDR isn't working unless people feel they can no longer protect themselves with their guns. (It also made me feel a bit more comfortable when I ended up driving through that bit of Wardak on June 5th... but that's another story).

On the other hand, the official commencement ceremony of the DDR "main phase" in Kabul on May 17 was slightly marred when a hundred Afghan army engineers refused to sign their discharge papers (no demobilization), claimed that the sixty Soviet-made rockets on display scheduled for destruction were duds (no disarmament), and angrily declared that the retirement offer of $200 per man, a bag of wheat, and vocational training were pathetically inadequate (no reintegration). And so far, most of the warlords who have offered to disarm have been the ones allied to the government. Their rivals generally refuse to relinquish their weapons, fearing that in a pinch the government will rearm or fight on behalf of their enemy.

Take our lunchtime DDR view, for example. We were in the province of Balkh, home to at least three major squabbling militia groups -- the Jamiat-e-Islami (mainly ethnic Tajik), the Hizb ul-Wahdat (ethnic Hazara), and the Uzbek irregulars of Abdul Rashid Dostum. I'm guessing that all those tanks we were looking at, lightly guarded across the road, came from the Jamiat warlord Atta Mohammad -- he's cooperated with the DDR program more than any of the other northern warlords, because his party happens to be the main power in the Kabul government. The defense minister, Mohammad Qasim Fahim, is the head of Jamiat, and has shown no qualms about sending the Afghan National Army in to back up his clients against other warlords (more about that in another update). It's hardly surprising that Dostum has so far refused to disarm in response to Atta Mohammad's gestures.

The success of DDR is absolutely essential. I think the need for a strong central government in Kabul is often overstated -- in a country as ethnically divided as Afghanistan, I would argue that you shouldn't make the center too great a prize, because then only one ethnic group will really be perceived as holding power at a given time. That's embittering for everyone else, and destabilizing for the country. (Right now, that dominant group is the Tajiks of the Panjshir valley and their political party, the Jamiat-e-Islami. More on that later, too). America currently works with both the Kabul government and the regional governors/warlords on development projects, poppy eradication, fighting the Taliban, and so on -- that could be formalized into a federal structure where the regions retain a great deal of authority. But while I don't think the central government should have a monopoly on power, I do think it should have a monopoly on guns. Local governors shouldn't be able to resolve their disputes by shooting each other (or their disputes with the Kabul government by shooting the police). And elections will obviously be a little more free and fair if the political parties aren't hanging out with Kalashnikovs around the ballot box.

What could be done to make the DDR program more successful? I can see two strategies that might help: (1) a crackdown by NATO and the Afghan army on warlords who don't disarm, and (2) an attempt to make the Afghan National Army more ethnically neutral, less a branch of the Jamiat-e-Islami. The first option is politically easier, and is already being pursued against Dostum, Ismael Khan, and several minor warlords. The second option would be tricky -- the Jamiat was the main branch of the Northern Alliance, and has enjoyed the backing of the USA ever since the war in 2001. Taking the Defense Ministry away from Marshal Fahim and giving it to some neutral technocrat (like the Interior Minister, Ali Ahmad Jalali) would be a tremendous political risk, even if you give Fahim a nice Vice-Presidency or something in compensation. But it would also make it easier for Dostum and Khan to relinquish their weapons, without effectively handing over power to a local rival.

[next: more travelogue, more political rambling]
(0) opinions -- Add your opinion