June 12, 2003
Roy Gutman, Senior Fellow
Beyond the Radar Screen: Afghanistan's Civil War and the Rise of International Terrorism
Introduction
What are the gaps between what we now know about was happening in Afghanistan prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001 and how journalists and human rights organizations perceived the situation at the time?
On June 12 the Institute hosted a presentation by senior fellow Roy Gutman on "Beyond the Radar Screen: Afghanistan's Civil War and the Rise of International Terrorism." A correspondent in the Washington bureau of Newsweek and director of American University's Crimes of War Project, Gutman is perhaps best known to American readers for his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1993 war and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where he provided the first documented reports of concentration camps. Gutman has continued to serve as a watchdog on human rights and war crimes issues in Afghanistan and was part of a team of reporters in August 2002 who were the first to cover the story in depth of the war crimes of the Northern Alliance, in particular the infamous "death convoy" used to transport Taliban prisoners.
During the presentation Gutman explored the findings from his research and insights gathered from a recent research trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he interviewed Pakistani officials, former Taliban supporters, journalists, and nongovernmental-organization (NGO) representatives about al Qaeda infiltration of the Taliban and the record of human rights violations during the civil war. Of particular focus during the presentation was a special look at the gaps between what is now known about Afghanistan prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and how journalists, policymakers, and human rights advocates perceived the situation at the time.
Report Summary
When the Taliban occupied Mazar-I-Sharif in 1997–98, looting, killing, and kidnappings reportedly took place over a period of four to five days. About 50 civilians were killed and their bodies buried in several graves at this cemetery.
Courtesy
Physicians for Human Rights
When operatives of Osama Bin Laden piloted commercial aircraft into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, members of Congress and the general public drew the logical conclusion that U.S. intelligence had failed, as had counter-terrorism policy and in a larger sense, defense policy. According to Gutman, there was another element to the story. Over-arching the catastrophe of 9/11 was a cluster of failures—primarily in foreign policy and in journalism—that centered on the state from which the attacks were directed, Afghanistan.
Gutman observed that the foreign policy failure had two elements. One was the failure to perceive in the aftermath of collapse of the Soviet Union that there was a vacuum in Central Asia, just as there was in East Central Europe and the Balkans. As is clear from the collapse of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, the demise of a security structure leads to a security vacuum. And if no major power fills it quickly, he pointed out, local and regional political players try to fill it in their own competitive ways, leading to aggression, resistance, and war. This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
The second policy failure was to view Osama bin Laden's rise as an issue for the counter-terrorism shop—by turning over U.S. policy for Afghanistan to that office and seeing the security vacuum in the rest of Central Asia as a U.S. defense issue, which was a job for the U.S. military's Central Command (Centcom). As instability continued in Afghanistan, and the fears grew of the export of Islamic insurgency, the Central Asians, starting with Uzbekistan, wanted a U.S. presence. Gutman argued that Centcom was only too eager to begin joint exercises, and start developing a joint approach to security with those states. But U.S. diplomacy did not see, did not bring to public attention, and did not focus on the inter-action between Central Asia and Afghanistan. By dealing with Afghanistan as a counter-terrorism issue only, it meant that there was a policy for Osama bin Laden—get him and kill him or lean on Pakistan to do the same—but not one for Afghanistan, which provided the context in which he rose to international prominence.
Gutman also argued that journalists failed to connect the dots between Afghanistan and the rest of the region. Sometimes in an instance of enormous, unpredicted change—like the collapse of an empire—if no one else can figure things out, the news media can help define the new era. And while it might be argued that the media as a group did a reasonable job in defining what was at stake in the Balkan conflict long before governments were willing to acknowledge it, Afghanistan was a different case. In the confused period of 1992 to 1996, when different mujahedin groups vied for power, all professing fundamentalist Islam but each in turn proving to be incompetent in governance, the lack of outside attention would be understandable were it not for the fact that tens of thousands of civilians were killed in Kabul as competing factions took aim at each other, with the United States watching from the sidelines. But the media failed most acutely in the period after 1996, when the Taliban took control of Kabul.
As is often the case, there were several stories going on simultaneously. With encouragement from the Clinton administration and women's groups, the media focused on the most egregious aspects of human rights practice, chiefly the mistreatment of women. In Gutman's view, what they failed to do was pay sufficient attention to the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, which was characterized by massive and systematic humanitarian law violations in Mazar I Sharif, Bamian, and Shamali as the Taliban moved north. Thousands of non-combatants, mostly Hazaras adhering to the Shia branch of Islam, were executed in cold blood simply because of their ethnicity or religious belief. In an October 1998 report, the UN special rapporteur for human rights, Choong-Hyun Paik of South Korea, estimated that 5,000 to 8,000 were killed, either civilians or soldiers who had surrendered to the Taliban after they took over the city of a half million. These developments went largely unreported.
The media and major governments were not alone in their failure, according to Gutman. The United Nations, which stepped into the breach in the absence of U.S. interest in Afghanistan, also failed to intercede in a timely way. Lakhdar Brahimi, the special representative of the secretary general, suggested to the Taliban that there be an international investigation into what happened in 1997. But the UN human rights high commissioner failed to organize an investigation.
Gutman concluded by noting that the lessons of U.S. policy in Afghanistan point to the fact that it is not just a buffer state; it is in many ways the fulcrum of the region, certainly the bridge between Pakistan and India and the markets of Central Asia, and the connection between the mineral resources of Central Asia and the markets of Pakistan and India. He recommended that the media report this region with the attention span and level of detail currently devoted to the Middle East. He also suggested that deputy secretary of State Richard Armitage's recent trip to India and Pakistan may indicate that the U.S. government has learned a lesson. The U.S. is playing a role in the Indo-Pakistani rapprochement now under way, even if the best newspapers and magazines this country has do not cover the story. Judging from the absence of reports on the rapprochement, he expressed concern that the American media have yet to learn the lesson of 9/11.
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