1977年的喀布爾市中心
現在人一談起阿富汗可能就想到深山、沙漠、游擊隊、與恐怖份子，還有那個囚禁著鋼鐵人的那個山洞。美國的幾個阿富汗問題專家與外交官則回想起1930到70年代阿富汗的美好。那時阿國還有一個像樣的中央政府，民主化與現代化正在起步。當地婦女不僅能上大學，還穿著迷你裙上大學。首都喀布爾甚至被某些人譽為「中亞的巴黎」。
可惜好景不長，1978年首相Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan被暗殺之後，戰亂就未曾停過。1979年蘇聯入侵，十年後被美國支持的回教民兵驅離，但這群民兵一部份成了今天的Taliban。塔立班在1996年控制了阿富汗，2001年又被美國推翻。之後又是一陣大亂鬥。
70年代末，一群阿富汗的菁英離開了國土，移民到美國、歐洲、與亞洲。這群人走了之後，來自美國與俄羅斯的援助也隨之中斷，阿富汗的民主化與現代化也嘎然而止。
October 18, 2009
Remembering Afghanistan’s Golden Age
WASHINGTON — From presidential confidants（密友） in the White House Situation Room to anchors（主持人） on cable television to ruminators（深思之士） at the city’s think tanks, the view has settled in: Afghanistan is an ungovernable collection of tribes that has confounded（使困惑） every conqueror since Alexander the Great. Like a lot of received wisdom, it may well be correct.
But as President Obama debates whether to send more American troops to Afghanistan, and whether, more pointedly, he might be sending them down a black hole of civic hopelessness, American and Afghan scholars and diplomats say it is worth recalling four decades in the country’s recent history, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when there was a semblance of a national government and Kabul was known as “the Paris of Central Asia.”
Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation, but one that built national roads, stood up an army and defended its borders. As a monarchy and then a constitutional monarchy, there was relative stability and by the 1960s a brief era of modernity and democratic reform. Afghan women not only attended Kabul University, they did so in miniskirts. Visitors — tourists, hippies, Indians, Pakistanis, adventurers — were stunned by the beauty of the city’s gardens and the snow-capped mountains that surround the capital.
“I lived in Afghanistan when it was very governable, from 1964 to 1974,” said Thomas E. Gouttierre, director of the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who met recently in Kabul with Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan. Mr. Gouttierre, who spent his decade in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer, a Fulbright scholar and the national basketball team’s coach, said, “I’ve always thought it was one of the most beautiful places in the world.”
Afghans today say that the view of their country as an ungovernable “graveyard of empires” is condescending and uninformed. “Unfortunately, we have a lot of overnight experts on Afghanistan right now,” said Said Tayeb Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to Washington. “You turn to any TV channel and they are experts on Afghan ethnicities, tribal issues and history without having been to Afghanistan or read one or two books.”
“Afghanistan,” Mr. Jawad asserted, “is less tribal than New York.”
Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American and the former American ambassador to Afghanistan who grew up in Kabul and the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, said that calling a country ungovernable was a standard reaction when Americans do not want to engage in a conflict, like Iraq or the Balkans. The response, he said, is articulated as, “We were wrong to have the objectives that we had because this place is unhelpable, they’ve been at war for a thousand years, who the hell do we think we are that we can solve this problem?”
Mr. Khalilzad would be the first to acknowledge that Afghanistan was always fractious（易怒的、暴躁的） politically, and that there were assassinations and coups even during the era of relative peace. But the current downward spiral did not begin until 1978, when the prime minister, Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan, was killed in a Communist coup, setting off three decades of conflict.
In 1979, the Soviets invaded, occupied Afghanistan for the next decade and were finally driven out by American-backed mujahedeen（回教死士） fighters, some of whom went on to form the Taliban, an Islamic student militia, which took control in Kabul in 1996. The Taliban in turn were toppled by the Americans in 2001, but fighting continued.
And by the end of the 1970s, many of the educated elite had fled and resettled across Europe, Asia and the United States. Gone with them was the promise of those earlier decades, when Kabul solicited foreign aid from both Washington and Moscow that brought in electricity, dams and irrigation, and when a young Parliament was trying out a fledgling（幼小的） democracy.
“There was definitely what was developing to be a newer tradition of a more open society and trained people” in those earlier years, said Paula Newberg, director of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, who was an adviser to President Hamid Karzai’s government in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004.
J. Alexander Thier, an expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace who lived in the country during the takeover by the Taliban in the 1990s, said that some Afghans returned to the country after 2002, but that many still lived abroad. He said he was not “incredibly optimistic” about Afghanistan after eight years of the current war, but that he supported robust reconstruction aid and American help to bolster（加強、改善） regional governments throughout the country. “I lived in Afghanistan in the absolute darkest days, when if Afghanistan was ever going to break apart into separate states, it would have happened,” he said. Now, he said, “the alternatives are so much more bleak and dangerous for us that we do need to keep trying.”
Frederick W. Kagan, a military expert at the American Enterprise Institute, made a related point: “Our enemies,” he said, “believe that Afghanistan is governable in its current state, because that’s what they’re trying to do.”
For now, administration officials say that much of the debate in the Situation Room is centered on whether the United States should focus less on the weak central Afghan government or put more money and effort into the provinces, where warlords have traditionally ruled. “We shouldn’t worry so much about Karzai, we should worry about empowering the governors and getting better district chiefs and police chiefs,” said a senior State Department official.
“I think Afghanistan is governable,” the official said, “but the question is at what level?”
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