What will it take for the allies to agree that the Afghan government isn't worth supporting?
I've written in the past about how the weak link in our Afghan strategy is the Afghan government which NATO and our other allies in Afghanistan are defending.
The new WikiLeaks cables provides more evidence of government corruption. One cable alleges that the Vice President of Afghanistan -- Zia Massoud -- was stopped in the United Arab Emirates because he was carrying $52 million dollars. In cash. It is difficult to believe that he was carrying his represents his personal fortune with him. If the cable is true, you could not do better as vignette of government corruption.
What is even more startling in a way is what the reaction says about such corruption. Firstly, Mr. Massoud himself simply denies taking money out of Afghanistan. And secondly, the Afghan government has responded to the general release of this new tranche of WikiLeaks revelations by saying that there is nothing in them which it finds surprising. The message they are sending is, in effect, that corruption is not news.
This comes on top of WikiLeaks revelations that US embassy staff consider Karzai "weak" and "driven by paranoia," a US ambassador who last year wrote that the government barely deserves a further US deployment, and a government which has already proved its anti-democratic credentials by winning an election thanks to deals with regional strongmen and unashamed quasi-official policy of bribing militants not to attack voters or polling stations. (As I have written before: it is perhaps indicative that we do not know this because some intrepid investigative journalist got the scoop, but because the head of Afghanistan's Intelligence service openly said so).
Why does this matter, you might ask? After all, the allies are supporting the Afghan government to prevent the return of the Taliban, not because it is such a straight-dealing institution.
True. But I would argue that such corruption, and the perception of such corruption, does indeed undermine our mission. At root, we are trying to build up the Afghan army and police force until it is strong enough to enable us to leave Afghanistan to run itself without the prospect of the Taliban returning.
Both are dangerous jobs, and have been the target of Taliban terror in the past. The risk to any individual seeking to sign up to either is high. But the more corrupt the government is seen to be, the harder it will be to recruit and retain the men for both the army and the police, on which the post-NATO future of this government depends.
Nor should we delude ourselves about the size of the task of giving Afghanistan a national army which controls all of its territory. Firstly, this has never happened in the whole history of the country. Second, we are talking about a country spanning 647,500 square kilometers of mountainous terrain. And thirdly, with no effective border at all with Pakistan, accountability and sovereignty in the border region is never going to be tightly distinguishable. And that means that when we are talking about a national army controlling the entirety of Afghan territory, it is not even clear where exactly such territory ends and that of Pakistan begins. Under these circumstances, the goal of denying the Taliban a safe haven within this territory is devastatingly ambitious. In these outlying areas, the national government is seen as a distant authority, one whose power very much depends on US and allied backing, and one that is corrupt.
I do not make these charges lightly. Like anyone, I want to see a stable Afghanistan with strong institutions and real progress, however slow, towards the kind of democracy in which votes are chosen and not bought and in which the government offers the people security and basic services rather than ends up as the destination for funds after a chain of backroom deals. But I just do not see that progress. The lack of surprise in Kabul at WikiLeaks' revelation that the vice-president of the country should be traveling with $52 million dollars on his person just reinforces the perception of cynicism at the top.
I want to see progress, but I do not. It is not so much that the government is corrupt, incompetent, increasingly undemocratic, lacks popular support or shows no signs of trying to regain it. It is that with a government like that, it becomes ever harder for the allies to tell the Afghans why they should support such a government, and ever harder for the leaders of allied countries to justify the deployment which keeps it there.
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Member of the Board of Directors at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and Chairman and CEO of Ibrahim Associates.
Follow me on Twitter (@AzeemIbrahim)
The world's most expensive and advanced military in the history of humanity and it's a nine year push.
Get out.
Green cards were not part of the deal.
It was mostly Afghans themselves, Northern Alliance which overthrew the the hated Taliban totalitarianism.
NATO forces, and Arab petro-dollars must be employed to secure Afghanistan from Taliban and foreign Jihadist entrenchment and some semblance of infrastructure built-- schools ( not the madrasas so beloved by Saudis) roads, telephone networks, housing.
This is how the troglodyte fundamentalists will be defeated. With arms and progress.
And in the area like Afpak, it can ONLY be done with alliances with tribal chiefs. which require major bribes and bakshish.
The bribes have to be in cash, Pushtu don't take American Express. Not yet.
The culprits got away, we let them.
We toppled the government and put a weak puppet state in place that we have to keep propping up.
I would like the author of this article to name a single Central Asian, Middle Eastern,. South American or African state where things can be accomplished without bribes.
In most of these countries, there are two kinds of people, those who give bribes and those who take bribes. On all levels, from a elementary school, traffic cop to Presidents, Prime Minsters, Sheiks Sultans and Kings.
If you look at history, it's pretty obvious that we will not make any lasting change there no matter what we do.
Text::
UN Security Council Resolution 1368 (12 September 2001)
Article 3 of the Resolution
"Calls on all States to work together urgently to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks and stresses that those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these acts will be held accountable;"
We abandoned ordinary Afghans to the medieval cruelty of Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies before. 9-11 was the result.
We should NOT repeat that mistake again.
After the "Sunni Awakening" in Iraq, the "Sons of Iraq" took great personal risks siding with US forces against Al Qaeda in Iraq. Once they were no longer useful, we abandoned them. We won't let these fighters relocate to the USA, while in Iraq the Shia seek revenge, Al Qaeda seeks revenge, and the Iraqi government doesn't want them either. The Afghani have seen how we will not protect or help people that help us. They'd be fools to side with the USA, a temporary presence, against the Taliban, who will still be there long after we give up and go home.