San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Anxiety rises as U.S., allied forces draw down
KABUL — Imtiaz Mohmand, just 19, makes a living selling melons out of a crate perched on his threewheel motorcycle in the Afghan capital’s KarteNow neighborhood. He only managed to finish grade 7 before being sent to work to help support a family of 13. He has been robbed twice.
In several days, he and four friends will leave Afghanistan. They have paid a smuggler to sneak them across the border to Iran and into Turkey.
“There’s no job, no security here. There are thieves everywhere. I tried to make a living but I can’t,” said Mohmand, who has seven friends already on their way to Turkey.
Mohmand’s frustration and anxieties run like a theme through most conversations as Afghans witness the final withdrawal of the U.S. military and its NATO allies.
President Biden has said that America did what it came to Afghanistan to do — hunt down and punish the al Qaeda terrorist network that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. After nearly 20 years, Biden said it was time to end America’s “forever war.”
Afghans, however, say international forces are leaving a country deeply impoverished, on the brink of another civil war and with worsening lawlessness that terrifies some more than the advancing Taliban. The warlords with whom the U.S.led coalition partnered to oust the Taliban are resurrecting militias with a history of devastating violence to fight the insurgents, who have made gains even in the warlords’ northern strongholds.
So significant is the danger that Washington’s top general in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin
Miller, warned last week in Kabul that escalating violence risked a civil war “that should be a concern to the world.”
Outside the Turkish Visa Center in Kabul’s city center, the road is crowded with fourwheel drive vehicles and new Toyota Corollas belonging to the wealthier who are looking for visas to leave. Since the announcement of the final withdrawal, thousands of visa applications have inundated the Turkish Embassy in Kabul. Other embassies have also reported a dramatic increase.
“Our people are thinking maybe a civil war will start and that is the main problem why people want to go abroad,” said Abdullah Saeed, a lecturer at Kabul’s Polytechnic University. He was applying for a visa to attend a conference. “Our political parties are all getting weapons. Everyone has weapons here, so that is why people are frightened.”
The closure of some Western embassies and warnings by others for their citizens to leave only deepen the sense of dread. While some Afghans choose to leave, legally or illegally, others settle their families abroad then continue to work in Afghanistan.
Afghans are lining up by the thousands at the Afghan Passport Office to get new passports, possibly to leave, uncertain what tomorrow will bring.
Salia Siddiqi sat under a tree with three of her seven children, one of thousands of people at the passport office. She was waiting to submit her papers for her family’s passports, though she wasn’t sure whether she’d be able to travel or how even to afford it.
“There is no security anywhere. You can’t travel to the provinces,” she said. “It’s not about me but what about my children? I don’t know if they will have a future here. We think there will be violence, it will be a dark time.”
“Our biggest enemy is uncertainty,” said Tamim Asey, founder and executive chairman of the Kabulbased Institute of War and Peace Studies. “It is not that we don’t have hope. … It’s not that we don’t have the capability to formulate or create a vision for the country in the absence of the international community. It’s that dark cloud of uncertainty looming.”
The jobless rate is officially at 35%, though likely higher. Asey says barely 13% of the hundreds of thousands of new university graduates every year find jobs. According to the World Bank, 54% of the population is below the poverty line, making less than $1.90 a day.