LONDON: In spite of having ransacked the academies and think-tanks of America and Europe in order to consult experts on Afghanistan, the western powers appear to have learned nothing, either from the September terror or from their much-lauded prosecution of the war. Even while the B52s make their parallel furrows in the sky over Kunduz, and a boletus of dust rises over each bombfall, Western politicians have already turned their attention to creating “a better sort of Afghanistan” in the words of UK International development minister Clare Short. She joined James Wolfensohn of the World Bank in recognizing that rich countries remain in constant danger while poverty persists and resentment at injustice smoulders. The model for rebuilding, however, bears small relation to the social and human reality of Afghanistan: it is clearly to be an off-the-peg version of economic restructuring, crafted by the global financial institutions with such conspicuous success elsewhere in the world.

The conference in Pakistan to discuss the reconstruction of Afghanistan this week is being hosted by the World Bank; a conclave not be confused with the meeting in Bonn to ensure the emergence of a broad-based government for an Afghanistan “freely determined” by its own people. In Washington last week, yet another cabal, co-sponsored by Japan and the US, was looking at ways of transforming Afghanistan into a “market economy”.

This is no doubt all being facilitated by what British ministers have hailed as the restrained behaviour of the Northern Alliance - illustrated perhaps by the more modest scale of its latest massacres in Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif - and evidence of a new political maturity. Indeed, the new rulers of a large part of Afghanistan are being treated with fresh respect. No longer cut-throats, dealers in heroin, arms and variants of radicalism, Doctor Abdullah, General Basir, Professor Rabbani and General Rashid Dostum have, as a sign of their rehabilitation, had their titles restored to them by the Western press.

While Kabul was exulting in new freedoms to fly kites and watch the war film Uroj at the cinema, the anti-terrorism, crime and security bill was being passed in Britain, curtailing ours. In the US President Bush signed an order allowing military tribunals to try suspected terrorists in private and without a jury; while the possibility of using, not torture, but “physical interrogation” of suspects was being widely discussed in order to safeguard our way of life.

In fact, so desirable is our way of life that the purpose of this week’s conferences is to find ways of exporting it to Afghanistan. “This time”, said Tony Blair, among others, and with an undertow of menace which was not missed by Islamic countries, “we will not walk away from Afghanistan”. No indeed. We are going to re-create it in our image. This means setting up a democracy after the fashion of our own thin and depleted electoralism, from which a majority, even here, are in danger of severe estrangement. No matter. This is the only model in the globe and the Afghans must be brought to see the unalterable wisdom and truth of it. Loya jirgas? Councils of elders? These are only for local colour, a prelude to entry into the modern world; even though the very demographic composition of Afghanistan suggests that it is no nation-state, but an arbitrary agglomeration of peoples owing allegiance to elsewhere, a consequence of ancient colonial divisions, a far cry from a single governable entity.

The west believes that it alone knows the secret of engineering social peace, which is by the healing balm of a large application of cash. This, after all, is the real western ideology, the solvent of all conflict, the restorative of universal amity and concord. The rebuilders of Afghanistan are themselves motivated by radicalism, unnamed and unrecognized, committed, as they are, to the coercive dogmas of an economic reason which bears so slender a relationship to human need.

The limits of the mindset of the combatants could not be more clear. To impose upon Afghanistan an intensification of injustice and inequality which has made it so hospitable to terrorism; to have understood so little about Islam that a broad-based, burka-burning, democratic state, with elections to be held in three years time, is the only offer to be conjured out of the atrophied imagination of the victors in this war against evil. Surely the western powers are not animated either by the promise of oil pipelines, those aortas of their economic lifeblood, or by the possibility of contracts for their construction conglomerates, with profits even more bloated than the corpses now littering the landscape of the liberated territories. The west does not see the millions of displaced in the dun-coloured tent cities in the dust, hunger and drought and the ruin of subsistence agriculture —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.