Year End Assessment Of Afghanistan: A Bleak Outlook

From December 19, Bill Moyers of PBS has a very interesting assessment of the situation in the country that talks about rising American casualties, the Taliban insurgency, and the Poppy trade. In the video he interviews the Washington Post’s Sarah Chayes, a former National Public Radio reporter who stayed in Afghanistan as a private citizen since just after 9/11. She has been running a co-op there which employs local Afghans. She speaks of the dangerously corrupt Karzai government that is driving a people who despise the Taliban back into their arms. The website has both the video and transcript. Some of the highlighted problems of the country:

So what we’ve really done is set up a kind of monopoly on the exercise of power. I mean, it’s the opposite of what everything that we consider to be democracy, we’ve allowed an abusive concentration of power in the hands of, in particular, the executives, be it, in particular, on a local level like the provincial governors and their acolytes. Because we’ve convinced ourselves and often we have to – by “we” I mean us and our NATO allies – convince our own public opinion that this is a democratically elected representative government of Afghanistan in order to justify the sacrifices in money and troops and things like that. But the Afghans see it differently.

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We do need more troops. And let me just remind you that the number of troops on the ground per population is pretty much the lowest of any U.S. post-conflict involvement since World War II. And at this point the Taliban kind of military campaign plan is effective enough that, you know, you do need troops to prevent them from making military encroachments that are really dangerous.

You also need troops to protect the population from the Taliban. There are people who don’t like the Taliban but may kind of knuckle under to them because, on the one hand, the government isn’t doing anything better for them. And the Taliban are going to kill them if they don’t visibly divide themselves away from the government.

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There is a direct link between Afghanistan and 9/11. I don’t think Afghanistan is an isolated place. Afghanistan is very connected to its neighbors, in particular to Pakistan. I don’t think that we can afford to leave this region alone to fester.

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So we need to get the knots out of our foreign policy here. It’s very perplexing to Afghans to understand that we are providing $1 billion a year to the Pakistani military which is creating the Taliban.

Sarah Chayes also points out the problem with “reconstruction” efforts and infrastructure being passed through the corrupt channels of the Karzai government. Additionally the key to Afghanistan may ultimately mean figuring out the machinations behind the military intelligence complex of the Pakistani Army and the religious extremism it not only tolerates, but fuels regionally. There have been some very notable critics of the mission in Afghanistan based upon the direction it has taken and under the stewardship of the regime of Karzai. Mr.Chayes also agrees that if we’re not willing to challenge President Karzai on “a manifestly corrupt removal of a perfectly upstanding governor”, then certainly she can understand why western nations wouldn’t want their men and women going there to die for corrupt warlords.

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Also related, a terribly depressing article about selling children in Afghanistan. While girls are relatively worthless, boys are fetching a price on the market, which has also fueled a human abduction and trafficking trade there.