“Afghanistan Needs a Hitler”

Boris Wojahn says he wants to close up shop “as quickly as possible.” Tomorrow, the 32-year-old travels on to Kundus; tonight he enjoys the autumn sun in a Kabul garden café behind high walls and barbed wire. A sign at the entrance reads “No Weapons” and armed guards check everyone entering.

Wojahn is an everyday sort of guy, not one to express himself with prim, empty phrases like a diplomat; he is more likely to call a spade a spade. Few other Germans have experienced Afghanistan as close-up over the past year as this man who calls the city of Braunschweig his home. He was first stationed in Kabul as a cook in the Germany army; later he opened a small hotel in Kundus named The Lapislazuli.

Since then, his hotel has become an institution, an oasis for foreigners in inhospitable Kundus; the hotel offers clean bed linen, showers and German cuisine, from fried potatoes to schnitzel. But businesses are all going through increasingly tough times.

Fewer and fewer foreigners risk travel to the region around Kundus, a city that was once considered safe but now finds itself on the front lines. The Taliban, augmented by Chechen troops, is now targeting the German army, according to Wojahn. Where German troops used to frequent the streets, few dare do so now. The Germans are now kept busy protecting themselves and they spend nights safely in their fortified compounds. “I’ve watched the country go steadily downhill since 2007,” Wojahn says. He sounds frustrated, and he’s not the only one who holds out little hope for this untamed, beautiful country so unfathomable to western imaginations.

The young are also losing hope as Afghanistan sees no solutions. “The smart young people are getting out,” Wojahn explains. It’s only the uneducated and the poor who stay. Even in Kabul, people these days feel like they’re on a sinking ship, and the election chaos only adds to the feeling of decadence.

As the United States tries to force President Hamid Karzai into a runoff election, many foreigners, aid workers, diplomats and business people flee to watch how things play out from a safe distance. The Taliban has promised more bombings.

Fear of the terrorists is pervasive: checkpoints are everywhere. Soldiers with scarves covering the lower part of their faces, looking more like wild militiamen than regular soldiers, patrol the streets in jeeps. A blimp hovers over the embassy area like a gigantic goldfish, keeping watch from overhead.

Only election day fever is missing; even in Kabul one sees few campaign posters. No one really believes that voting will really take place on Nov 7. After opposition leader Abdullah Abdullah withdrew his candidacy, Karzai is the only one running. A one-man show like that will turn the election into a farce.

Behind the scenes, the United States is desperately looking for a way out of this deteriorating mess.

“People are sick and tired of these elections,” says Mirwais, a Pashtun, as he shoos wasps away from his little daughter’s glass of Fanta. Mirwais is only 26 years old but already a widower. His young wife died, probably from diseased kidneys, something that says a lot about the lack of medical care in Afghanistan.

Afghans are angry that the U.N. is wasting millions on election theatrics, Mirwais says. The money, he thinks, would have been better used for reconstruction. “Nobody wanted a runoff election,” he says, “only the foreigners.” Despite his support for the Pashtun Karzai, Mirwais says he won’t go to the polls. He says it’s too dangerous, a sentiment heard often across the country. Afghans seem to have little enthusiasm for risking their lives again. “Why should I vote,” snorts Ahmed, a waiter. The 25-year-old Hazaran reacts as if someone just asked him an offensive or at least a truly stupid question.

The restaurant in the heart of Kabul is a microcosm of the entire nation – caught between Islam, new freedoms and the culture of violence. Antique weapons decorate the restaurant walls as Tajik pop videos flash across the flat-screen television showing young girls with mini-skirts and plunging necklines. The censorship board has modestly blurred the exposed flesh, but the fact that the videos are even being shown would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Music pours from taxicab radios and on Friday brightly colored kites again dotted the skies over Kabul. All that had been forbidden by the Taliban as well.

The elections disappointed practically everyone. “What happened to my vote?” Ahmed angrily asks. He believes Karzai’s supporters stole it.

Mirwais sees it as do most Pashtuns, who are the majority ethnic group making up 45 percent of the population. The West robbed Karzai of his deserved election victory by falsely claiming that he cheated. He can’t understand the West’s outrage. “You’ll find a bit of election fraud everywhere,” he says

Others just want to forget the whole thing. When one vegetable seller is asked if he will vote in the runoff, he answers, “Why not?” That answer doesn’t mean yes or no, it’s just a sign that he’s not interested.

The Taliban are the victors. They have shown that even Kabul can’t be made safe from their attacks. They ridicule the ongoing election squabbles as “soap opera.” There’s little doubt that the debacle has done nothing to strengthen the fledgling democracy.

Sentiment for a strong leader is growing. “Afghanistan needs a Hitler,” says Mirwais; one must bear in mind that in Southwest Asia and India Hitler isn’t seen so much as a mass murderer as he is a powerful leader.

Ahmed also says, “We don’t need democracy. We need a Pinochet, a Fidel Castro or an Atatürk.” Even those proponents of a democracy privately say the same thing, just in more polite form: the country needs a U.N.-imposed president, not one elected by popular vote, says one man who doesn’t wish to be identified. “Both Karzai and Abdullah should be gotten rid of,” he says.

The real losers of this election aren’t to be found in Afghanistan, but in Washington and Europe. The West tried to justify its war in the Hindu Kush as a “war for democracy.”

The notion that a medieval tribal society could be transformed in just a few years was a serious misjudgment. “The Afghans didn’t want that system,” says Wojahn. “They have their own ways of controlling things; the Loya Jirga (grand council) for example.” Now, the election fiasco and the deception have inflamed criticism of Western involvement instead of calming it down. The essential question now being asked is, “What is the West doing in Afghanistan?”

And the questions being more and more loudly asked are whether Afghanistan can be saved at all, and if so, how? The nation is in a state of crisis, politically, militarily and economically. The West is kidding itself if it believes all the fault lies with Karzai’s corrupt government. The international community doesn’t deserve any congratulations, either.

The Americans and their allies will soon be involved in Afghanistan as long as the Soviet Union was before they left in humiliation in 1989. The comparison isn’t a pleasant one for the West: “The Russians did a lot for the Afghan people,” says Wojahn. They built roads and apartment buildings with central heating. In a country where temperatures can sink as low as minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s like heaven.

More than anything else, the opium trade flourishes in Afghanistan directly under the noses of the occupying international troops. Measures to halt it are ineffective at best; the international effort against it often appears to be uncoordinated and sluggish.

Experts calculate that only around 20 percent of the financial aid Afghanistan receives trickles down to the people themselves; the remaining 80 percent flows right back to the countries that provided it, back to the corporations and aid agencies that cobbled it together.

According to Boris Wojahn, the most important items are being ignored: Afghanistan needs roads, electrical power and jobs. “And the people need food, heating fuel, schools and medical services,” he concludes.