An Afghan policeman auditions for the role of Estragon
By Steve Hynd
Even those of us who oppose any kind of McChrystal Plan for troop escalation in Afghanistan are getting a bit antsy waiting for Godot Obama to make his mind up. I realise that its a complex set of issues - a real Gordian Knot, in fact - and that all the options are bad ones. But ferchissakes, it's the sixth or seventh "strategic review" carried out by the administration or the military since Obama took office; I'm not sure any longer because there have been so many I've lost count.
And indications are that the players are just running over the same old ground and hoping for a pony. The portion of a NATO conference scheduled for Monday which was supposed to discuss force levels in Afghanistan has been postponed until at least December so that it can "take into account the latest developments in that country and the outcome of President Barack Obama's strategic review of the war". The UK's Gordon Brown has been running around like a lackey trying to drum up support for Obama's War - he's asked eight NATO countries for extra troops and so far only Slovakia has said yes. They'll double their commitment to 490 soldiers for a non-combat mission at Kabul Airport. Big fat hairy deal. Germany has extended its mission for a year but won't send extras and plans to be out by 2013. France has said "non" and Italy has said "Non c'�erso". While the main British parties have coalesced around supporting US signals that any surge will be aimed primarily at training Afghan security forces and only be backed by a political exit plan even Afghanistan can only commit to a measly 5,000 extra troops in Helmand.
And while we're on that subject of Afghan security forces, the overall idea of "they'll stand up so we can stand down" that the Obama administration has adopted wholesale from the Bush one is looking increasingly unrealistic.
While Mr. Obama ponders his options, the Afghans remain a force of largely illiterate soldiers led by corrupt, incompetent officers. Every year, one out of every four or five recruits quits, which makes increasing their overall numbers rather difficult. According to The New York Times, recent internal U.S. government reports indicate that the number of Afghan battalions able to fight independently has actually declined in the past six months.
Two public reports � from the Inspector-General of the U.S. Defence Department and the Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, both available on the Web � point to a mix of progress and setbacks. However, nothing in them suggests that training an effective Afghan military or police will be easy or speedy. Certainly, these forces will not be up to serious tasks in the next year or two.
The idea, therefore, of thrusting in tens of thousands of additional U.S. soldiers to stem a deteriorating security situation, then withdrawing them and letting the Afghans smartly carry on the fight, appears more pipe dream than grounded in reality.
More pipe dream still if the surge further breaks a U.S. military that is already crippled by PTSD.
Worse, all of that will become moot if the Afghan government can't get its shit together to deliver some modicum of effective governance. I personally doubt that common Afghans would give a fig about their leaders making out like bandits in the graft stakes if they also did some actual governing work, but the indolent elite of Kabul's narcopalaces have all the sense of entitlement of feudal royalty without the sense of responsibility that used to accompany that status.
On the fringes of Karzai's inauguration - an event from which journalists have been banned lest some world leader gets their picture snapped with a warlord or drug trafficker - his own brother illustrated that feudal thinking and the way it fuels corruption.
One person that none of the foreign dignitaries will want to be seen with is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President�s brother, who has become a symbol of everything that is wrong about the administration. Although only a member of the Kandahar provincial council, he is in reality one of the most powerful people in the country. He has repeatedly been linked by Western officials to Afghanistan�s lucrative narcotics industry.
Yesterday the President�s brother admitted that he enjoyed his influence because of his family ties. �Yes, I am powerful because I am the President�s brother,� he said. �This is a country ruled by kings. The king�s brothers, cousins and sons are all powerful. This is Afghanistan. It will change but it will not change overnight.�
Karzai understands that he'll have to make some sacrifices, but he also understands that his own neck is on the line if his faux anti-corruption drive goes too high or too far. Thus he'll throw some tokens out to the wolves. His attorney general told Der Spiegel in an interview reported today that he plans to indict three former and two current ministers for graft - all doubtless minor political players and not even the tip of the iceberg. One may well be the current Afghan Minister of Mines, who has been accused by an anonymous Obama official of taking a $30million bribe to green light China's copper mine at Aynak. Given the whopping level of bribery and graft U.S. based corporations have engaged in, that's sheerest hypocrisy in the service of the U.S. corporatocracy and will only serve to piss off the Chinese, who had been offering ways to help America out of its self-induced quagmire. And still, none of this will touch fol like Karzai's brother or other powerful warlords he can't afford to get on the wrong side of. As Der Spiegel reported:
Just how Karzai should meet the demands of the international community remains unclear. Washington and London are pressuring him to discard his designated vice president, the feared former warlord Mohammad Qasim Fahim, known to Afghans simply as "Marshall Fahim." Fahim isn't just considered to be corrupt, but is also thought to head up the country's lucrative kidnapping industry. Karzai chose Fahim for the votes he brought with him.
Diplomats in Kabul merely roll their eyes when asked about Fahim. "Fahim is for us a non-person who we would rather see before the International Criminal Court in The Hague instead of in the presidential palace," one high-level NATO official from Brussels recently told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Just as problematic for NATO is General Dostum, who Karzai recalled from his exile in Turkey in an effort to secure the support of those in northern Afghanistan who remain loyal to Dostum. Dostum is now demanding a number of top posts for his followers.
Throwing "bags of gold" at Taliban types is the latest British solution to all this Gordian knottiness, echoing the good old days of colonialism when the "wogs start at Calais" and everyone who wasn't a Briton could be assumed to be bribeable or shootable with impunity. As Human Rights Watch points out, its a fatally flawed assumption nowadays.
At best this buys a temporary space to build the government and security forces. At worst it backfires through bad intelligence, fuels corruption and creates grievances among Afghans who did not take up arms, and were not rewarded with gold. Engaging in lawlessness to address lawlessness seems perverse at best.
...Foreign embassies and armies must also change the way they operate. By having security alliances and holding high level meetings with known criminals, and hiring the armed men of former warlords or drug traffickers to provide security or logistics, they expose themselves as hypocrites to Afghans taking risks to reform their country. This short-termist deal making must change.
And finally, hovering over all like the spectre at the feast, is Pakistan's on-again, off-again entanglement with its own varieties of Taliban - bot the ones it supports and the ones it doesn't. There, all the indications are that the Pakistani military are about to play whack-a-mole again in South Waziristan, declaring victory and getting out before guerrilla tactics can attrit their own glowing propaganda.
Obama's decision is not an easy one, that I freely admit, and I'll take the vanity option of quoting myself on that:
It's a perfect Gordian Knot; when you tease out one bit to untangle it, another bit just gets pulled tighter, and there's no sword sharp enough to cut it. Anyone (including myself) who puts forward a solution for one tangle without mentioning how their solution would make other bits of the knot more intransigent is just blowing smoke up their reader's asses. Frankly, though, the notion that all of this can be untangled by military forces - practising counter-insurgency or otherwise - is truly worthy of the description "laughable".
But he could do far worse - and likely will do - than take the advice of the Guardian's Simon Jenkins:
Britain and America should demilitarize the war on terror, surely the most counterproductive main-force deployment in recent history. They need no longer rely on grand armies, popinjay generals and crippling budgets; on bringing death, destruction and exile to hundreds of thousands of foreigners in the faint belief that this might stop a few bombs going off back home. They would hand that job to the appropriate authorities; to the police and security services.
The modalities of withdrawal need obvious attention. Only idiots talk of leaving "overnight", but only idiots make departure conditional on some unachievable objective, such as more European troops or an operational Afghan army or honesty in Kabul. Defeat must be spun as victory. Retreat must be covered by the smokescreen of a loya jirga or "surge, bribe and leave". But it cannot be conditional on fantasy.
This war was never to be won, any more than that in Iraq. Both were neocon nation-building stunts that ran amok on too much money. Three million Iraqis, including almost all Iraq's Christians, were driven into exile. The same is starting in Afghanistan and will become a flood as NATO retreats. That nation's agony is not over yet, but the end cannot begin until the invaders depart. That will happen only when the pain outweighs the pride. The question is, how many corpses will that take?
The only question Obama has left to answer is: does he have the courage to overcome the Wuss Factor say that the pain already outweighs the pride. What's taking him so long?
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