Jochen Becker
1979 and following
Between Kabul and Tehran

Hammer and sickle grasp to Afghanistan: This warcarpet was made by an carpettrader from Herat, living since 1983 in an pakistanien refugee camp near Islamabad

Mine-clearing in Afghanistan

New Alliances
The domestic opponents of the Taliban formed the "United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan" (which became known as the "Northern Alliance"), which was supported by the Iranian and Russian governments, while the Taliban established their headquarters in Kandahar. The previous complex fragmentation of the country and the population was temporarily replaced by a strict division, and Kabul lost its supremacy for a short while. Alternating fronts, massacres and the blockade of UN food transports led to a large number of civilian victims.

Afghanistan became the training ground of militant Islamists who had previously been active in Central Asia, the Muslim-influenced parts of the Balkans, Algeria or Tajikistan. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. administration under George W. Bush proclaimed an international "coalition against terror" and started "Operation Enduring Freedom". Not even four weeks after 9/11, U.S. forces bombed Afghanistan, where they assumed the self-confessed person behind the attacks, Osama bin Laden, to be. (12) In October 2001 the American high-tech weaponry struck a country already destroyed. An estimated 40,000 "Afghanistan veterans" fled the country in great haste during the bombardments. They are considered the nucleus of new terror cells and the perpetrators of acts of resistance in the Arabian region and southern Europe, while Osama bin Laden remains at large.

In December 2001 the participants of the Afghanistan Conference in Königswinter near Bonn, Germany, officially agreed on the southern Afghan Pashtun leader, Khan Hamed Karzai, as the provisional head of the country. The ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) was established as an occupation force. Until today soldiers from the United States, Great Britain and the German KSK (detachment of special forces) are fighting against followers of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and local resistance groups, warlord structures and poppy cultivation. The outsourcing of torture to secret prisons, called "black sites", and the military instrumentalization of the relief organizations characterize the "long war". Violent clashes over the control of country roads, opium fields, wells, and mining sites are on the daily agenda. Economically powerful warlords and provincial rulers as well as Afghans in exile - usually in the United States - exert great influence on the country's politics. In this context, the military events and security issues threaten to block out the social conflicts and protests of the population. For example, Conrad Schetter reports of a student demonstration in November 2002 against the poor living conditions in their halls of residence. The contributions of Deborah Ellis, Sandra Schäfer and Elfe Brandenburger in this volume call the hardly noticed struggles and activities of Afghan women to mind.

Risen from the Ruins
"Afghanistan is rising from the ruins of war and will live forever". With these words, President Hamed Karzai opened the constituent assembly of parliament in the capital city Kabul in December 2005. (13) But Afghanistan still belongs to the poorest countries in the world; in the past twenty years the population has probably doubled, despite the various wars. According to the United Nations' World Food Program, one third of the Afghan population is suffering from malnutrition. And while the Hamburg Senate intends to deport Afghan refugees to the "Welcome Center" of their allegedly peaceful country of origin, NATO head De Hoop Scheffer is poised for decades of Western military presence in Afghanistan (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feb. 3, 2006). In 2005 alone, more than 1,600 people were killed by attacks and military clashes. (14)

Deeply rooted experiences with violence, the socialization of a considerable part of the population in refugee camps or in exile, as well as an illiteracy rate of 60 percent render the process of nation building and the reconstruction of urban and social structures extremely difficult. "We are currently not in a position to ensure the livelihood for these refugees returning from Europe and especially Germany", The Afghan Minister for Repatriation, Azam Dadfar, contradicts the assessments of the German Office of Foreign Affairs (Danesch 2006: 16). "Kabul is a city constructed on the failures and successes of the international will both past and present and on the responding shifts and manoeuvres of the local population" (Maiwandi/ Fontenot 2004: 242). For example, the parliamentary building constructed under the monarchy in the 1960s, and no longer required after the coup in 1973, served to accommodate refugees for decades. The last bullet holes were recently plastered to do it up for the newly elected parliament. But also the groups of the population driven from their homes, soldiers and mercenaries, must be reintegrated into the city and society, something which demands a difficult process of reconciliation and reunion, and massive reconstruction efforts. The "international community" is providing considerable resources to this end, but they frequently do not have the desired effect due to the lack of an overall development plan. (15)

Almost the entire foreign aid is funnelled through Kabul. The majority of the estimated 2,400 relief organizations are seated here. However, around 75 percent of the funds earmarked for Afghanistan are used by the approximately 24,000 international helpers themselves. Moreover, the well-provided "internationals" boost the prices on the housing market. A sub-standard flat in the capital, for instance, already costs 250 euros a month, while the "locals" are only able to earn two euros a day in the building industry - one of the few flourishing economic sectors. Ninety percent of Kabul's residents are not connected to the electricity mains, they have many children and the women must go begging. Land and house squatting are acts of sheer survival here. The unresolved ownership situation of an Afghan population dispersed throughout the world additionally impedes the planning predictability of urban reconstruction. In the short term the egregious housing problem could be alleviated by legalizing the occupations, but in the long term large parts of the city would then be badly developed without planning.

TEHRAN / IRAN
Established within its present-day borders since 1828, the multiethnic state of Iran spreads from the Bosporus to Pakistan. But as opposed to Afghanistan, the "nation building" pushed through by Reza Khan Pahlavi in the 1920s did not stand in opposition to the population, and thus led to a more stable state structure. (16) When Reza Khan died in 1944, crown prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi assumed power at the age of merely 21. While, due to the occupation by Great Britain and the Soviet Union, closer ties were established between Iran and Hitler-Germany in 1941, the Bonn Republic of the 1970s sought to revert to a past era of authoritarian monarchies, and transfigured the "Shah of Persia" (17) and his royal household. The "last German emperor" was a figure of both ridicule and admiration.

What characterizes political life in Iran until today are less political parties than groups oriented toward personalities with alternating loyalties. The interim president Mohammad Mossadeq is still remembered as an outstanding politician. His struggle to nationalize the oil industry and his superior dealing with the neo-colonial behaviour of the economic power of Great Britain at the beginning of the 1950s led to an appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague and the UN Security Council. Great Britain, which controlled four fifths of the oil deposits of the Persian Gulf, lost this case to the "people's leader of the Third World" (Nirumand 1985: 55).

In order to break the supremacy of the old European occupiers the Iranian government after World War II increasingly asked the United States for assistance in modernizing the country, its police, finances, army, and railway system. This was carried out via American missions: tens of thousands of U.S. troops came into the country for this reason. But in the summer of 1953, Mossadeq was brought down by the CIA and put under house arrest. He was replaced by the autocratic rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had meanwhile returned from exile. There were no more free elections until his overthrow in 1979. SAVAK, the secret service installed by the United States, controlled the country from 1957 on. Israeli experts later trained members of the Iranian secret service.

Rhetoric of Anti-Colonialism
In the imperial age, Iran and Afghanistan were buffer states between the expanding world powers of Russia and England. Both countries were never entirely under foreign rule, but they were economically dependent on the big powers. Like Afghanistan, Iran until today produces raw opiates: This goes back to the time of British occupation, because Great Britain funded the administration of its colony India by exporting opium to China. The "Tobacco Revolt" of 1891 in Iran against the monopoly of the British "Imperial Tobacco Corporation of Persia" and the repeated protests against the exploitation of oil deposits (18) by the "Anglo-Iranian Oil Company" (today known under the brand name BP) still resonated during the revolution in 1979.

In 1968 the Islamic philosopher Ali Shariati, who was influenced by Marxism, made his first public appearance as the intellectual counterpart of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was already influential at the time. The motto, "Neither East nor West, but the Islamic Republic", signalled a perspective beyond the two power blocs of the Cold War. Political Islam as an alternative to communism and capitalism took shape in theory. As a stipend recipient in Paris, the former village school teacher, directly influenced by Frantz Fanon - whose texts he translated - and Jean Paul Sartre, and who was impressed by the liberation struggle in Algeria, developed an anti-colonial theory for Iran.

Like Bahman Nirumand in his book, Persien. Modell eines Entwicklungslandes [Persia. Model of a developinng country] (1967), Shariati viewed Iran as part of the Global South and not of the so-called First World, as the Shah propagated. At the same time, Shariati worked on an anti-Western critique of consumption and on newly interpreting Islam. His more than 150 publications, contributions and wall news-sheets, as well as the lectures he recorded on cassettes for the many illiterate persons, circulated in editions of millions. Fatima is Fatima, his text on the Western woman as commodity, was read by leftist and traditional Iranians alike. Khomeini tolerated Shariati, who in 1977 died in British exile as a result of torture, as a guiding intellectual force of the Iranian revolution.

Ayatollah Khomeini's own lectures, The Islamic State, held in front of theology students in spring 1970 in Iraqi exile in Najaf, was also imbued with an anti-colonial rhetoric particularly directed against England's politics and the "destructive and corrupting role of colonialism" (Khomeini 1983: 25). But Khomeini did not leave it at Koran interpretations. He simultaneously formulated a militant political programme which was anti-Semitic and directed against Israel, the West, the USA, and especially the Shah: "They want your oil. (...) They want to make our country a market for their goods" (ibid.: 30). Here, anti-colonial and anti-Zionist patterns of argumentation were interwoven in an instrumentalizing way, something which also belongs to the strategy of the current Iranian president, Mahmood Ahmadinejad. In 1979, 100,000 Jews lived in Iran, today there are just 25,000. In addition to the Lebanese Hezbollah, Islamistic Iran is presently supporting the Palestinian Hamas and their attacks on Israel with money, weapons and training facilities.

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