The Rise of Jihadistan

Not long ago, the Bush administration was fond of pointing to Afghanistan as a model of transformation. That mountainous landlocked country, we were told, was being converted from a "failed state"--Al Qaeda's base for the worst ever attacks on U.S. continental soil--into a functioning, responsible member of the international community. In speech after speech, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials ticked off the happy stats: the Taliban and Al Qaeda had been routed, democratic presidential and parliamentary elections had been held, more than 3 million refugees had returned and 1.75 million girls were attending school.

But the harsh truth is that five years after the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, most of the good news is confined to Kabul, with its choking rush-hour traffic jams, a construction boom and a handful of air-conditioned shopping malls. Much of the rest of Afghanistan appears to be failing again. Most worrisome, a new failed-state sanctuary is emerging across thousands of square miles along the Afghan-Pakistan border: "Jihadistan," it could be called. It's an autonomous quasi state of religious radicals, mostly belonging to Pashtun tribes who don't recognize the Afghan-Pakistan frontier--an arbitrary line drawn by the British colonialists in 1893. The enclave's fluid borders span a widening belt of territory from mountainous hideouts in the southernmost provinces of Afghanistan--Nimruz, Helmand and Farah--up through the agricultural middle of the country in Ghazni, Uruzgan and Zabul, and then north to Paktia and parts of Konar (graphic). It extends well across the Pakistan border where, despite close cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries, jihadist militants in Waziristan province have begun calling themselves "Pakistani Taliban." No longer worried about interference from Islamabad, they openly recruit young men to fight in Afghanistan, and they hold Islamic kangaroo courts that sometimes stage public executions.

There are not nearly enough U.S., Western or Afghan troops or resources in the field to counter them. At a time when the American president has resurrected Osama bin Laden as public enemy No. 1--comparing him recently to Lenin and Hitler--Bush's own top commander in the field, Army Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, says not enough money is being invested in creating a new Afghanistan. Improving Afghan lives is the only way to drive a stake through the Taliban or put the elusive Qaeda leader out of action, he says. "We need more in terms of investment in Afghan infrastructure. We need more resources, for road building, counternarcotics, good governance, a justice system," Eikenberry told NEWSWEEK last week. As the general is fond of saying: "Where the roads end, the Taliban begin."

Indeed, the aid numbers for the past five years are grim. In the first years of reconstruction, aid amounted to just $67 a year per Afghan, says Beth DeGrasse of the government-funded U.S. Institute of Peace. She compares that figure with other recent nation-building exercises such as Bosnia ($249) and East Timor ($256), citing figures from the International Monetary Fund. "You get what you pay for in these endeavors, and we tried to do Afghanistan on the cheap," she says. "And we are going to pay for it." International conferences since 2002 have pledged some $15 billion, but countries have ponied up less than half of that so far. And the Afghan government estimates it will need $27.5 billion through 2010 to rebuild the country and its institutions.

Some critics point to a jarring mismatch between Bush's rhetoric and the scant attention paid to Afghanistan. Jim Dobbins, Bush's former special envoy to Kabul--he also led the Clinton administration's re-building efforts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia--calls Afghanistan the "most under-resourced nation-building effort in history." Former Bush reconstruction coordinator Carlos Pascual, who retired in December 2005, does not dispute this assessment. He says the State Department has "maybe 20 to 30 percent" of the people it needs. Even Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, fretted last week that for five years the administration and Congress have failed to create a powerful nation-building czar, despite their enthusiasm for regime change. "We have a long way to go," he said.

The dangers of allowing Afghanistan to become a jihadist haven again are too many to count. It's not merely that bin Laden and Zawahiri may now die peacefully in their beds, safe among Pashtun tribesmen, as a senior U.S. military official conceded to NEWSWEEK last week, speaking anonymously because he was discussing classified operations. (A French intelligence report leaked over the weekend suggested bin Laden had done just that in August, dying quietly of typhus, but like many such rumors in the past it could not be confirmed.) Nor is the problem simply that the increasingly confident Taliban is launching ever more brazen attacks--in recent weeks, bombing a convoy scarcely a block from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and assassinating a major provincial governor.