Whose parade?

Who doesn’t love a parade? The New Afghan Order, interim version, staged its first late last month – a military review – with an upbeat impulse reminiscent of George M. Cohan. No one did show biz better than America’s early 20th-century vaudevillian. No one does power better, for now, than a coterie of Afghan leaders from one small valley called the Panjsher. Power is largely show biz – a.k.a. impression management – and the Panjsheris who run Kabul these days would concur with Cohan’s lyric: “You won’t do any business, if you haven’t got a band/The folks expect a street parade and uniforms so grand.”

Most of Kabul’s authentic “folks” were kept on a distant hillside, but (thanks to stylish Afghan duds and the gift of local gab) one old and uncredentialed ex-pat wangled a VIP seat. What he witnessed – mostly Panjsheris parading before mostly Panjsheris – reveals both the current state of Kabul politics and its ultimate unsustainability. Parades are all about occasion, execution and personnel. We take these in turn, leaving for last the key question of who was who and whose parade it really was.

Occasion: April 28 marked the 10th anniversary of the Afghan Holy War capture of Kabul and “victory over alien, Godless communism.” In this case, rhetoric does not detract from truth. The year 1992 ended a true and amazing Islamic jihad prompted back in 1978 by a Marxist coup on, coincidentally, the same April date. Those 14 years witnessed the unthinkable: defeat – and, indeed, utter collapse – of that era’s Evil Empire at the hands of a small, ragged, essentially medieval, utterly determined people to whom the so-called “experts” (this one included) had given no chance at the outset. The mujahedin proved everyone wrong but themselves. Proportionate to their numbers, they also did more than anyone else to help us win our Cold War. And, arguably, it was the Panjsheris who proportionately did most of all.

Never mind, for a moment, that their triumph turned to horrendous civil conflict. Never mind that Afghanistan, from the American perspective, shifted from heroic anti-communist ally to pariah terrorist breeding ground. And never mind that American ignorance and (worse) indifference enabled that shift. April 28 recalls a Great Day, and the Afghans deserved their parade.

Execution: For the world’s most completely failed state, Afghanistan staged quite a show. The parade started a few minutes late and lacked a well-scripted finale, but – at least on the surface – it evoked images of competence, predictability, and (above all after two dozen years of chaos) physical security. Cohan’s prescribed band was uniformed if not quite “grand.” Callow youths and gray-beards combined to play on key for two whole hours as the various detachments, each with distinctive outfits, passed in eyes-right review. There were no surprises, no incidents, and only one minor snafu as two featured parachutists pulled their cords prematurely and were blown out of sight.

Otherwise one did feel a kind of grandeur. The sense began, vividly and tragically, with several columns of amputees who headed the march. First a group of men on crutches, each with a leg gone. Then another column who’d lost arms: empty sleeves on one side, Afghan flags held aloft in the remaining hand. Then a third contingent with no legs at all, wheeling under their own energy. Several had been grotesquely wounded, but there was no hint of self-pity or complaint. Strong stuff.

Then came the military detachments, each distinctively uniformed and each ranging across generations. Their weapons – from AK-47s to Soviet-era MIGS to a pair of enormous SCUD missiles – had mostly been captured from what was once the world’s largest army and then from the Taliban. It had taken a quarter century. They’d hung on to win. Where was the Soviet Union now? Where was the Taliban? Strong stuff.

Persian and Pashto announcers from now-reviving Radio Afghan-istan alternated on the public address system. Ethnic/regional balance is especially at issue in the matter of language, and this day’s equal-time strategy was applied to both prose and poetry. Spirits soared with each new verse. Strong stuff.

Personnel: So far so good, but here’s the crux: Whose parade was it after all? On the surface – a thin surface, transparent to most Afghans – this parade belonged to the new and theoretically pluralistic Afghanistan.

The bigwig spectators were laudably varied: Hamid Karzai (chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority), his multi-ethnic cabinet of tribal leaders and technocrats, the newly constituted diplomatic corps momentarily loosed from their fortress-embassies, the U.N. negotiators whose Bonn Conference last December put this government in place, and the top brass of ISAF (International Security and Assistance Force) which keeps the peace in Kabul.

Even more fundamentally diverse, after six years of Taliban suppression, was the mere presence of several hundred Afghan women: seated in their own section and with hair covered by scarves called chadors … but at least on hand and no longer shrouded in burqas. This female elite – and also their millions of still burqa-ed sisters – are doubtless freer now than at any time since that of – gasp! – Soviet-backed communism with its up-front gender-equal ideology.

But who provided Ministry of the Interior security? Who were the thousand-odd uniformed soldiers who filled peripheral spectator seats in case push came to shove? Which military detachments dominated the parade itself? Who drove the heavy armor past the reviewing stand? Who piloted the aircraft overhead? Most of all, whose picture was on every placard, at the front of every column, atop the reviewing stand, confronting the reviewing stand in a portrait of mammoth proportions, and even displayed by the errant parachutists before they were wafted away?

Answer: the Panjsheris and their iconic, martyred champion Ahmad Shah Masood. One part of one faction of the erstwhile Northern Alliance now rules Kabul – and seeks to extend that rule nationwide – in the name of a dead man.

This column has given the Panjsheris and the larger northern alliance their due (“Two cheers for northern alliance,” BDN, Nov. 27). It has also warned of taking Masood iconography too far (“Curtains Rising and Opening,” Dec. 25). Just as the Taliban hijacked post-Soviet Afghanistan and just as al-Qaida hijacked the Taliban, now the Panjsheris – ethnic Tajiks whose brethren comprise no more than 25 percent of the country – risk the appearance of trying to hijack both the Afghan Interim Administration and June’s scheduled Loya Jirga (National Assembly).

Item: Pushtun Hamid Karzai was seen, seated front and center, but not heard. Not a peep from the (supposed) top man. The sole speech was delivered by a Panjsheri who succeeded to Masood’s military command and is now defense minister. The muffled take of a man next to me: “One man has the name; the other has the power.”

Item: The recently returned ex-king Mohammed Zahir, another Pushtun, was neither heard nor seen nor even mentioned. In government media “His Majesty Zahir Shah” has been demoted to “His Excellency Zahir Khan.” Pashtuns say that the Panjsheris have placed him under effective “house arrest.”

Item: The entire two-hour parade contained not one single detachment of troops from the Pashtun South. The Pashtuns represent Afghanistan’s ethnic plurality, circa 45 percent, and have always (except for part of 1929) supplied the country’s national leadership. Their only representation at this parade was a listless dance troop whose co-opted performance ended matters with a whimper.

Item: The other main cities of Afghanistan – and the warlords who dominate them – held their own 10th anniversary parades. No delegations were sent to the capital. The parade in Mazar-e-Sharif led to serious bloodshed between rival factions whose warlords accused each other of using the event to import troops and arms.

George M. Cohan also coined the phrase, “Always leave them laughing.” The 10th anniversary parade left me with more with more fear than laughter. Afghanistan has dismissed, or at least deferred, its ideological conflicts. Its issues now are ethnic and regional. As Loya Jirga time approaches, the Panjsheris must decide whether to share power and empower Hamid Karzai … or maximize an already untenable position and risk a return to chaos.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. His column will be printed as circumstances permit.