No Miracles

Even in Kabul, an island of relative peace, Afghans suffer from frequent abuses at the hands of civil authorities. If the presence of ISAF troops is almost universally found reassuring, the effect is largely psychological — the peacekeeping soldiers rarely leave their armored vehicles. The streets are almost entirely empty at night — even of car traffic — because people are afraid to leave their homes, and are as frightened of the police as they are of criminals out of uniform. Despite recent attempts to create a more ethnically representative national police force, most police officers are still former Northern Alliance soldiers, ethnic Tajiks from areas north of the capital, and are roundly resented by locals who suffered at the hands of repeated Northern Alliance bombardments and occupations during the country’s long civil war. Almost every Kabuli you meet can tell at least one story about someone close to them having their home robbed by armed men in police uniforms (often on the pretext of “searching for al Qaeda”), or being arrested on trumped-up charges to solicit expensive bribes. Much of this, of course, goes officially unreported. “There is no law,” says Sima Samar, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. “That is the problem.”

If only through its actions, the American government is implicitly admitting its fears and its failures. The U.S. is soon expected to announce the replacement of outgoing Ambassador to Afghanistan Robert Finn with Zalmay Khalilzad, a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld; to appoint American advisers with largely military backgrounds to Afghan government ministries; and to siphon an extra billion dollars into Afghanistan from the Iraqi war budget. The aid is more than welcome, but few people here are expecting many miracles.