Handing over Afghanistan to Afghans

The Hazara-majority province of Bamiyan was handed over to the Afghan authorities on Sunday marking the beginning of the official transition that is expected to allow the foreign troops to completely vacate Afghanistan by 2014. Straddling the mountainous central Afghanistan Bamiyan has remained relatively peaceful, mainly for the Taliban's low-profile presence - who have earned local hostility also for undermining the area's tourism potential by vandalising two sixth-century Buddhist statues during their reign.
The transition is said to be 'condition-based' in that the Transition Committee would closely monitor the developments following the handing over, but whether it reverse the process, in case of the negative process nothing is officially said. During the months some seven more areas would be given under the control of the Afghan authorities, including the famous cities of Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat and Lashker-Gah, the capital of Helmand province where conditions remain unsettled.
Whether the transition timeline, as expected to play out, is realistic the Afghan opinion is sharply divided. There are some people like Afghan Interior Minister Besmulla Mohammadi who says "We always wanted to stand on our feet. We have wanted this for 10 years" and others like the Deputy Speaker of the Afghan Parliament, Ahmad Brehzad, who thinks "If Nato forces leave Helmand everything will be in a mess in just one day". The overall burden of the argument on transition is in favour of the latter, as senior analyst at Kabul-based Afghanistan Analyst Network Thomas Rutting believes "Afghans are really afraid of the time when transition is over and they are left to their own devices".
The US-led Nato forces had come to build Afghanistan, but what they are leaving behind after nearly 10 years of war is a people and land in deep trouble with little hope of recovery. Afghan society is more fractious today than ever before, along extremely lethal ethnic and sectarian lines, some of which were not there before the entry of foreign forces. The much-touted mission to democratise the Afghan polity is neither here nor there, as warlordism rules the roost under the thin garb of parliamentary democracy.
Not only this, even the progress made by the Taliban government in curbing opium cultivation and their fairly effective law and order system seems to have been reversed. Thanks to outsiders' indifference Afghanistan is back on the top of the list of illicit drug producing countries. And as for the law and order situation what to talk of the countryside even the capital is not secure - last week President Karazi's brother was assassinated in Kandahar and only the day before a close aide of the president and prominent Afghan chieftain was killed at his residence in the heart of Kabul. Of course, the American generals had opposed troops' drawdown timeline but their argument lacked sensibilities for human life and offered nothing in return except more bloodshed of Afghans and their own soldiers, perhaps only to vindicate their misplaced hubris and arrogance forgetting the message of history that Afghanistan has always been a graveyard of foreign forces. For whatever reasons, Afghanistan is not yet ready to take over its own control. But its continued occupation is not possible any longer either, and that's the dilemma which defies resolution.
One inescapable reality likely to emerge from foreign troops' pullout and transition of control to local Afghan security forces would be an enormous vacuum of power - too eagerly awaited by the insurgents. Last year when the coalition forces vacated the Afghan provinces bordering Pakistan's north-western tribal agencies, the space was filled by the Taliban and not the local Afghan troops, adding to the fragility of the area from which of late, a series of forays have been launched by the Afghan Taliban into Pakistan. Should the United States and its allies persist in their present scheme of things in Afghanistan, unmindful of its repercussions and ramifications for the regional countries, the process would only worsen the Afghan imbroglio. For a durable solution of the Afghanistan problem, the country's immediate neighbours - Pakistan, Iran, China, the Central Asian Republics - and the Russian Federation have to be taken on board.
Of course, there are some voices criticising the haphazard transition process from India but these are more in line with New Delhi's policy of using Kabul as a pincer with Afghanistan acting as the second jaw of the device to grasp Pakistan than for any love of the Afghans. One would hate to be critical of the move to hand over Afghanistan to the Afghans but there is the problem both with its timing and the manner. Ideally, the close neighbours of Afghanistan should be mandated by the United Nations become party to the process of transition. Clearly its earlier mission to restore peace and stability to Afghanistan by dispatching an expeditionary army has flopped; so it should revisit that mandate and try hammering out a regional solution to the lingering Afghan tragedy.