Obama, Karzai and an Afghan mirage
Last year, under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan slipped three places on a widely respected international index of corruption and became the world’s second-most corrupt country. It now ranks 179th out of 180, a place long held by Somalia.
According to a United Nations report published in January, Afghans paid $2.5 billion in bribes in 2009, roughly a quarter of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (not counting revenue from the opium trade). The survey, based on interviews with 7,600 people, said corruption was the biggest concern of Afghans.
On the military front in a war more than halfway through its ninth year, attacks on U.S. forces and their NATO allies totaled 21,000 in 2009, a 75 percent increase over 2008, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) a week before Karzai’s visit to Washington. The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, noted that Taliban insurgents had set up a “widespread paramilitary shadow government…in a majority of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.”
The Pentagon, also in advance of Karzai’s visit (in the second week of May), reported that Afghans support his government in only 29 of the 121 districts the U.S. military consider most strategically important.
“The insurgents perceive 2009 as their most successful year,” the Pentagon said. “The Afghan insurgency has. ..a ready supply of recruits drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks.” As to corruption: “Real…change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful.”
In case all this has led you to the conclusion that the Afghan glass is half empty at best, that’s not the way President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton portrayed it during Karzai’s visit. Yes, there were difficulties ahead, they said, but overall things were looking up. “We are steadily making progress,” Obama said. “Progress in Afghanistan is real,” echoed Clinton.
Was this a matter of two leaders seeing a mirage, or a 21st century version of the “we see light at the end of the tunnel” assurance Americans heard during the Vietnam war? Or was it simply overdue recognition that Obama is stuck with Karzai no matter how unpopular he might be or how much credibility he lacks?
Obama’s good war goes bad
In the protracted Washington debate over the war in Afghanistan, the most concise analysis so far has come from America’s top soldier: “If we don’t get a level of legitimacy and governance (there), then all the troops in the world aren’t going to make any difference.”
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was speaking two days after Hamid Karzai was declared the winner, by default, in August elections so massively rigged that a U.N.-backed electoral complaints committee threw out about a million Karzai votes. That forced a run-off from which his challenger, former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah withdrew, saying the second round would be just as fraudulent as the first.
So much for an exercise in democracy President Barack Obama had used as his rationale for escalating the war a few months after he took office. “I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important.”
It was. It showed that the United States and its NATO allies are fighting on the side of a corrupt and discredited government in a war, now in its ninth year, for which, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, there can be no purely military solution.
An angry assessment of the Afghan leader last year by Thomas Schweich, a former top anti-narcotics official in Afghanistan, has proved prophetic. Karzai, he said, had been playing the Americans like a fiddle ever since he came to power. “The U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends would get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term.”
U.S. officials, including Admiral Mullen, are now calling on Karzai to purge Afghanistan of corrupt officials by arresting and prosecuting them. This is an unlikely prospect. In his victory speech, Karzai said he would work to wipe off “the stain of corruption” but said that could not be done simply by removing corrupt officials.
The implicit notice that there would be no major house-cleaning followed a telephone call Obama made to Karzai to say it was time for “a new chapter based on improved governance (and) a much more serious effort to eradicate corruption…” If previous promises from Karzai are any guide, the new chapter will remain unwritten.
I recall that the planning and training for the 9/11 attacks took place in Hamburg, Germany, and in the USA, respectively. Afghanistan was where Osama made video/audio tapes, and from there initiated wire transfers via a satellite phone.
To assert that the US and its allies are in Afghanistan to “prevent another 9/11″ is to call all of us idiots, and apathetic idiots at that. Now we are also told that we must fight in order to “send a message” about our resolve. I’m not sure why we are really still there, but given the available facts our leaders must either be idiots themselves, or liars, or both. And it speaks volumes about the American people.
@avid
Perhaps you should try to clarify the so called ‘capability’ which the USA has but was not able to defeat the so called enemy in Korea and Vietnam?
Rex Minor