“Grand Assembly” Or Grand Deceit?

~ by Jan Qarabaghi ~
December 2003

The political circus playing for the last ten days in Kabul under the name of Loya Jerga or “Grand Assembly” is nearing its final days. The Khalilzad-Brahimi-Karzai trio, who runs the show, not only from behind the scene but also shamelessly from within the scene, seems to have achieved what most observers expected them to achieve: The rubber-stamping of a flawed, imprudent document touted for the consumption of the world opinion as the new constitution of a “liberated” and “democratic” Afghanistan.

Those familiar with the machinations of the trio during the last two years, and cognizant of the ground realities of the deeply fractured Afghan psyche and politics, had not expected anything different from what happened and is happening in this gathering: Generous use of American taxpayers’ dollars to buy support for Karzai and his presidential (read dictatorial) powers, naked use of threat and intimidation tactics to stifle any voice that opposes the scripted proceedings of the gathering, and open, shameless political love-making and wheeling-and-dealing of the trio and their functionaries with the darkest elements of the ultra conservative, extremist groups. These are only a few of the trio’s mafia-style modus operandi designed to build their personal fortunes and fame at the cost of true liberation for the tragedy-hardened, long-suffering people of Afghanistan, not to mention the cost to the American idealism that is so heedlessly and brutally sacrificed at the altar of greed and animal spirit.

Like in any other game of political intrigue and mischief, the long-term winners of the swindle taking place in Kabul are those who have mastered the deadly art of political opportunism and transmutation during the last two decades of invasions, crises, and national/international betrayals in Afghanistan. People who, just a few years ago, issued Fetwas calling the Loya Jerga idolatrous and un-Islamic constitute over seventy percent of the gathering, while the most notorious among them are serving as heads of the committees, committees that have been created by the Khalilzad-Brahimi-Karzai trio and their quislings to make the show easier to run and more amenable to improvise and manipulate. People who cut women’s breasts and made praying beads out of the victims’ nipples are now deciding the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan. People who sold hundreds, if not thousands, of teenage Afghan girls and boys into slavery to their Arab friends and financiers are now discussing how to provide equal educational rights and restore health services to hunger-stricken Afghan moms and children. People who invented and added new methods of human-killing to the annals of history (among them Container Gassing, Dancing of the Dead, and Skinning of the Alive) are discussing human rights for the men and women of Afghanistan. People who opposed the Taleban because their leader was called Ameeral Mumeneen, now, citing Sharia, are calling Karzai the Ameer of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, and defend his arbitrary selection of 50 appointed delegates as the rightful privilege of the Islamic Ameer (welcome back to the future). And, lest we forget, people who still pillage, kill, kidnap, rape, and maim, are gathered under the white tent to decide how to bring rights and justice to the same people whom they have tortured and traumatized for the past two decades of war and ashes.

This is the depressing story, and these are the skilled/ruthless players, of the so-called Grand Assembly convening under the German-donated white tent in the chilly weather of the Afghan capital. (In this scene of mixed tragedy, irony, and treason nothing seems to be white except the imported tent itself.) More depressing and chillier though may be the end outcome of the play: An unforgettable disappointment for a people of 25.8 million who, after a short intermission of hope and nostalgia, wakes up to the hard realities of the world’s Real-politic, and once again begins to feel the burning pain of betrayal, deception, silence, and powerlessness. Even before its grand finale, Afghans, including a large number of those attending the gathering in Kabul, have started to call it “The Grand Deceit”.

  © Qarabaghi/Afghan Observer 2004.