Asia Sentinel
Already subscribed? Login here
Society Afghanistan Quick, Before The Quagmire Sets | Quick, Before The Quagmire Sets |
|
|
| Written by Eric Ellis | |
| Tuesday, 17 March 2009 | |
|
Page 1 of 2
Iraq seems, at last, yesterday’s war. Now the Forgotten War in Afghanistan, the one that’s been going on longer, has become — again — the Just War. Barack Obama says he will change the character of the war against a resurgent Taleban, at the pointy end of the desert wastelands of the Pashtun south. But two centuries of foreign engagement in Afghanistan suggest it is going to take considerably more than the confident word of a young president. From the 1842 massacre of Elphinstone’s army and the Soviet adventure of the 1980s, armchair strategists insist foreigners have no business in Afghanistan, that it’s a graveyard of lost causes and good intentions. But should past disasters in Afghanistan be the measure for this conflict? And do we have the luxury of not trying to assuage this deleterious land? Or is Afghanistan irretrievable, and to be avoided at all costs? Eight years and $30 billion after the US invasion that followed the 9/11 attacks on America, Afghanistan isn’t much different from the basket-case failed state abandoned by the Taleban. Here are seven points that might help save Afghanistan from becoming ‘Obama’s Vietnam’ and to address some of the mistakes of the past eight years.
1: Get rid of President Hamid Karzai Most Afghans, and increasingly, the new Obama White House, scorn him. Witness the recent election date fiasco. Karzai decrees a snap poll for April instead of the planned August hoping he has caught his opponents on the hop. Bad idea, choruses everyone, including the US. The emasculated Karzai meekly acquiesces, but warns of a ‘constitutional crisis’ because his term officially expires in May. Constitutional crisis?! Would that this was the most pressing of Afghanistan’s myriad crises. No one cares. Karzai could step down now and only his billionaire brother and cronies would notice him missing. A likeable man, Karzai should gracefully retire while he can as ‘the statesman who brought democracy to Afghanistan’, and join Gorbachev — now showing: ‘Why Afghanistan is a Tough Nut to Crack!’ — on the globaloney circuit. Why get yelled at by Richard Holbrooke and other rude Americans, arm-wrestle pesky Pakistanis and always be dodging assassins — I had to negotiate seven layers of security to interview him in 2006 — when he can get his Wimbledon-hued robes laundered daily at the Four Seasons Milan while Tom Ford and Anna Wintour secure the front row by the Prada catwalk for their exotic Eastern friend. Karzai could become a Kabuli Jimmy Carter (more effective out of office than when in it) monitoring elections in Zimbabwe, and let Obama pick someone else to be Afghanistan’s president.
2. Jail the warlords Bush lavished millions on them and suddenly men who would gouge each others’ eyes out for sport were doing the buzkashi cha-cha in sleek Chevy SUVs and getting seats in government, their salaries paid by the west’s taxes. Karzai’s cabinets have always been bipolar; half the ministers technocrat returnees from long exile in the West, half warlord cavemen, the two united not by faith or a hatred of the Taleban but by a no-longer-relevant anti-Soviet feeling, which pleased their veteran Cold Warrior sponsors in DC. The ‘New Afghanistan’ turned out to be not so new at all. You can’t buy an Afghan, so the saying goes, but you can rent one, and for Nato and its allies, renting warlords meant fewer military widows back home, and a lair meant one fewer province to police. The Taleban might not have allowed his daughter to go to school, but the average Afghan often despised the warlords more than he did the Talebs, who at least gave him security to rebuild his house that sociopaths like the Uzbek gangster Dostum and friends the Taleban had earlier trashed a dozen times in the seesaw battle they fought until Osama took out the World Trade Center. That warlords were a big source of Afghan grievances, not least with their addiction to heroin, didn’t matter to the West. As the Atlanticists saw it, Afghan history began on 9/11 and there were 3,000 deaths to avenge. Besides, the Taleban equalled al-Qaeda and burqas and the Dark Ages, and the warlords, well, they didn’t equal al-Qa’eda anyway. But Washington’s Cold War ‘They’re sons of bitches, but they’re our sons of bitches’ argument shouldn’t hold here. Afghanistan’s warlords are criminals and the Hague’s courtroom is where they belong, not the country’s leadership.
Presidential contender Ashraf Ghani, a World Banker and former finance minister who was sacked when he started pointing fingers at corruption in the cabinet, is right when he says the war is equally fought in the economy as in Helmand. After eight years and more than $20 billion in aid, 60 per cent of Afghans live below a poverty line calculated for their miserable circumstances and lag in the bottom five of most every human development indicator. But a lot of people have got rich in Afghanistan since 2001, notably importers of fuel to fire the generators needed because the state can’t — or won’t — provide adequate power. The aid community has done well too, and wasted a lot of your money. Foreign ‘experts’ — some barely out of college and with no practical experience of what it is they are advising on — can earn $1,000 a day and more in danger money to work in Afghanistan. Very little makes its way to the local economy, save the tony bars and restaurants that have sprung up to serve them. One of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in Kabul was a surfboard circling the airport baggage carousel, which belonged to an American jock working for consultant Bearing Point. This was his first job out of college, and he loved that he could escape all-expenses-paid to Sri Lanka for a week a month, and could boast to his college chums that he was earning six figures in a war zone. Ashraf Ghani once told me he wouldn’t hire, on merit, 75 per cent of the ‘advisors’ foisted on the government. This is probably an underestimation. There is massive corruption in Afghanistan, and not all of it among Afghans. A lot of money that should be spent on new schools and power stations is paying for first-class home leave to Peoria.
And here’s a bonus point. Do a Switzerland on Dubai. Force the Emirati sheikhs to open the books like the gnomes in Zurich are having to. There’s millions salted away in Dubai’s banks and a lot of that loot was yours.
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email This
Hits: 14723 Comments (4)
  written by Anti-Bush, March 17, 2009
The Islamic terrorists are threats to the West. Instead of sending more foot soldiers to Afghanistan, a better solution is to quarantine the Jihadis and Talibans in PakisAfghan and the Islamic world in general.
written by Pakteen, March 17, 2009
Thanks , I am very much impressed by your understanding of Afghanistan. These are largely soemthing we need to do there.
written by captjohann, March 18, 2009
As long as rest and recreation is available in Pakistan, US will face the defeat as Russians
written by O'bama, March 19, 2009
We now know that foreign Arabs, Afghan, Uzbek and Uigher Islamic terrorists are safely esconed in the Pakis Swat under the protection of the Pakis Talibans. But the US is now keen to let loose the Gitmos terrorists in US soil and its Western allies so as to facilitate more terrorist attacks. Now we have or are freeing Ethopian terrorists to UK, Uigher terrorists to Sweden, Arab terrorists to Yemen etc. Keep up the good cause for human rights for the terrorists.
Write comment
|
Eight difficult steps to sort out the war in Afghanistan
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Mockingindian
Donate to Asia Sentinel
