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It is Mujiburahman Poya's youth that makes his face jump out from among the posters of the 41 candidates for Afghanistan's presidential election next month. Surrounded by images of the grizzled faces of older men sporting traditional hats or business suits, year-old Poya's poster declares him "The Real Afghanistan" and promises that if elected, he will enrich the country rather than himself.

No matter how appealing voters find that message in a country plagued by corruption, though, it will be at least another 22 years before they can tick Poya's name at the polling booths. Afghanistan's constitution sets the minimum age for a President at Poya isn't actually running for election; he is a contestant on The Candidate , a reality-TV show that follows six Afghans ages 22 or younger as they compete to develop the policies, campaign and support necessary to win a poll of viewers voting by SMS text messages on their mobile phones.

There had been some hope for a genuinely competitive election last spring, when several popular politicians announced plans to run for President, but Karzai responded by winning endorsements from key power brokers and making shrewd political alliances with former rivals, giving himself a commanding lead. That prompted a Western diplomat to lament that Karzai was both "unpopular and unbeatable. Despite high voter-registration figures, a combination of security fears, the potential for vote-rigging and indifference toward the candidates has many analysts fearing a dangerously low turnout that could undermine the legitimacy of the winning candidate and hand the Taliban a powerful propaganda tool.

Producers of The Candidate, which airs on the privately owned Tolo TV network, are hoping to help by focusing Afghans on what they want from their political leaders. And Tolo has a successful model for its idea of tele-democracy: So we started to think, How do we do the same thing in terms of elections? It's never about policy and it is never about the outcome you want. So we thought a program based on a competition about policies could change that.

Each week, the show's contestants debate a policy topic such as security, education, health care and the economy. Although a rotating panel of judges rate the candidates based on presentation, strategy and persuasiveness, viewers get the final say, voting one candidate off the show each week, starting with the fourth episode and culminating a week before the real election. Some western politicians go so far as to say that the alleged Soviet defeat in Afghanistan helped to cause the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Strategy and Reality in Afghanistan

On this they agree with Bin Laden and al-Qaida's other leaders, who claim they destroyed one superpower and are on their way to destroying another. The reality is the Afghan mujahideen did not defeat the Soviets on the battlefield. They won some important encounters, notably in the Panjshir valley, but lost others. In sum, neither side defeated the other. The Soviets could have remained in Afghanistan for several more years but they decided to leave when Gorbachev calculated that the war had become a stalemate and was no longer worth the high price in men, money and international prestige.

In private, US officials came to the same conclusion about Soviet strength, although they only admitted it publicly later.

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Losses were high and their impact on the Soviets was not great. This myth of the s was given new life by George Crile's book Charlie Wilson's War and the film of the same name, starring Tom Hanks as the loud-mouthed congressman from Texas. Both book and movie claim that Wilson turned the tide of the war by persuading Ronald Reagan to supply the mujahideen with shoulder-fired missiles that could shoot down helicopters.

The Stingers certainly forced a shift in Soviet tactics. Helicopter crews switched their operations to night raids since the mujahideen had no night-vision equipment. Pilots made bombing runs at greater height, thereby diminishing the accuracy of the attacks, but the rate of Soviet and Afghan aircraft losses did not change significantly from what it was in the first six years of the war. The Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was made in October , several months before Stinger missiles entered Afghanistan in significant quantities in the autumn of None of the secret Politburo discussions that have since been declassified mentioned the Stingers or any other shift in mujahideen equipment as the reason for the policy change from indefinite occupation to preparations for retreat.

One of the most common promises western politicians made after they toppled the Taliban in was that "this time" the west would not walk away, "as we did after the Russians pulled out". Afghans were surprised to hear these promises.

They remembered history in rather a different way. Washington blocked the Soviet-installed President Mohammad Najibullah's offers of concessions and negotiations and continued to arm the rebels and jihadis in the hope they would quickly overthrow his Moscow-backed regime.

‘If reality in Afghanistan exposed, pressure on US to withdraw will be immense’

This was one of the most damaging periods in recent Afghan history when the west and Pakistan, along with mujahideen intransigence, undermined the best chance of ending the country's civil war. The overall effect of these policies was to prolong and deepen Afghanistan's destruction, as Charles Cogan, CIA director of operations for the Middle East and south Asia, —, later recognised.

I think that was probably, in retrospect, a mistake," he said. The key factor that undermined Najibullah was an announcement made in Moscow in September , shortly after a coup mounted against Gorbachev by Soviet hard-liners collapsed. Yeltsin was determined to cut back on the country's international commitments and his government announced that from 1 January , no more arms would be delivered to Kabul.

Supplies of petrol, food and all other aid would also cease. The decision was catastrophic for the morale of Najibullah's supporters. The regime had survived the departure of Soviet troops for more than two years but now would truly be alone.

Khalilullah Sharifi (Author of The Real Reality of Afghanistan And)

So, in one of the great ironies of history, it was Moscow that toppled the Afghan government that Moscow had sacrificed so many lives to keep in place. The dramatic policy switch became evident when Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of one of the mujahideen groups, was invited to Moscow in November In a statement after the meeting, Boris Pankin, the Soviet foreign minister, "confirmed the necessity for a complete transfer of state power to an interim Islamic government". In today's context, the announcement could be compared to an invitation by Hillary Clinton to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to come to Washington and a declaration the US wanted power transferred from Karzai to the Taliban.


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The move led to a wave of defections as several of Najibullah's army commanders and political allies switched sides and joined the mujahideen. Najibullah's army was not defeated. It just melted away. Osama bin Laden got to know the mujahideen leaders during the anti-Soviet jihad after traveling to Peshawar in He returned to Saudi Arabia, disillusioned with the Saudi royal family for collaborating with the US in the Gulf war against Saddam Hussein in — In Afghanistan, there was cause for disappointment too.

The mujahideen's incompetence was preventing them from toppling Najibullah. After Sudan came under pressure to deport him in , Bin Laden had to find somewhere else to live. Najibullah had finally lost power in Afghanistan, and Bin Laden decided it might be the best place after all. His return in May was prompted less by a revival of interest in Afghan politics than by his need for a safe haven.

His return was sponsored by the mujahideen leaders with whom he had become friendly during the anti-Soviet struggle. He flew to Jalalabad on a plane chartered by Rabbani's government that also carried scores of Arab fighters. It was only after the Taliban captured Jalalabad from the mujahideen that he was obliged to switch his allegiance or leave Afghanistan again.

Perceptions and Reality of Small Arms in Afghanistan

He chose the first option. The Taliban had softened their ban on girls' education and were turning a blind eye to the expansion of informal "home schools" in which thousands of girls were being taught in private flats. The medical faculty was about to re-open for women to teach midwives, nurses, and doctors since women patients could not be treated by men. The ban on women working outside the home was also lifted for war widows and other needy women. Afghans recalled the first curbs on liberty were imposed by the mujahideen before the Taliban.

From , cinemas were closed and TV films were shortened so as to remove any scene in which women and men walked or talked together, let alone touched each other. Women announcers were banned from TV. The burqa was not compulsory, as it was to become under the Taliban, but all women had to wear the head-scarf, or hijab, unlike in the years of Soviet occupation and the Najibullah regime that followed. The mujahideen refused to allow women to attend the UN's fourth world conference on women in Beijing in Crime was met with the harshest punishment. A wooden gallows was erected in a park near the main bazaar in Kabul where convicts were hanged in public.

Some 50, Kabulis were killed. Afghanistan has a long history of honour killings and honour mutilation, going back before the Taliban period and continuing until today.