Kabul Needs Good Neighbours

Kabul: As Afghans head to the polls next month for the first direct presidential election in their history, the guessing game has already begun across the region: How long before the impatient Americans declare democracy in Afghanistan and go home? And how can neighbours with age-old security, economic, ethnic and religious interests in Afghanistan prepare for when that time comes?

In this sense, the current campaign for President is as much a regional as a national contest. In Afghanistan, all politics are ethnic, and political candidates, like provincial warlords (often one and the same), are proxies for neighbours and foreign powers waging historic competitions for influence.

The interim President, Hamid Karzai, Washington's favourite and a member of the Pashtun ethnic group, which represents some 40 per cent of Afghans, remains the man to beat. But with 17 challengers it will be difficult for Karzai to win an outright majority in the first round of voting on Oct. 9 and avoid a run-off.

Whatever the result of the election, a new generation of Afghan leaders gives hope for the future, and it will be Afghan voters who determine the next President. But if past is prologue, it will be Afghanistan's neighbours who will ultimately decide whether this country succeeds as a sovereign nation or remains a failed state.

The 19th-century Great Game between the British and Russian empires for dominance of the region led outsiders to interfere in the land of the Afghans. Discussions with political, economic and military officials here suggest that common regional security and economic interests may finally give Afghanistan's neighbours a reason to help make it, not break it.

US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad says that Washington is determined to "avoid a renewed cycle of destructive geopolitical competition in Afghanistan."

In the Declaration on Good Neighbourly Relations signed two years ago, Afghanistan's six neighbours — Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and China — pledged not to interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs. Yet given their history of meddling, none were invited to participate in NATO's International Security Assistance Force here. With the possible exception of Pakistan (whose military intelligence service values Afghanistan for the "strategic depth" it would provide if Pakistan were attacked by India), none of Afghanistan's neighbours have an interest in its slipping back into the hands of a fundamentalist Islamist regime that might again sponsor attacks against their governments.

Likewise, the entire region has a common interest in keeping out the Afghan opium and heroin that flow through Tajikistan, Iran and Pakistan into Russia and Western Europe. Afghanistan is once again the world's leader in opium production. Iran is the world's leader in opium interdiction.

Landlocked Afghanistan will also need friendly neighbours if it is to realise finance minister Ashraf Ghani's dream of the country as a "hub of regional commerce" instead of conflict. Zalmai Rassoul, the national security adviser, envisions Afghanistan as the "Dubai of Central Asia," with its central location as "a land bridge for north-south trade" making trade and tourism the future pillars of its economy.

Afghanistan as a hub of regional commerce? In fact, Iran, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan are already providing electricity to large chunks of Afghanistan. India is helping Iran develop road and rail routes to Afghanistan and Central Asia. The Iranian port of Chabahar will be used to move goods to and from Afghanistan.

New Delhi is also considering so-called "peace pipelines" — natural gas pipelines from Iran and Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian subcontinent, which would bring Kabul and Islamabad hundreds of millions in transit fees. But Krishna Rasgotra, the former Indian foreign secretary, tells me that "the pipelines will remain a pipe dream unless there is peace between India and Pakistan."

For the past three years, the international effort to rebuild Afghanistan has been stymied by a lack of coordination among NATO allies, the United Nations, Afghan agencies and nongovernmental organisations. Ambassador Khalilzad has created an Afghan Reconstruction Group to better organise these efforts. Provincial reconstruction teams led by NATO and its partner countries are now coordinating humanitarian and reconstruction efforts.

But nation-building in Afghanistan will mean little without region-building. Washington must forge a comprehensive approach to the region's security and economic challenges affecting Afghanistan or lose an opportunity of historic proportions.

If the United States is not inclined to invest the time, money and patience necessary for Afghanistan to succeed, it should consider that Afghanistan's neighbours, who may not always share American interests, have a valuable commodity Washington does not — all the time in the world.