More Of The Mess That Is Afghanistan

Consider some recent news articles whose information has been accumulated and summarized in recent editions of The Week magazine, all of which illustrate what a mess Afghanistan is:

• The November 5, 2010 issue of The Week magazine reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai regularly receives bags of cash from the United States main menace in the word, Iran. These Iranian cash deliveries total about $2 million a year and are a regular part of the Afghanistan government's operations, according to Karzai. He also stated that he also receives regular cash deliveries from the U.S. government, a claim that our government has disavowed.
• In the same article, Transparency International's most recent list of the most corrupt countries in the world ranks Afghanistan as the second most corrupt country in the world, trailing only Somalia. Considering that Somalia really has no central and functioning government anymore, you could make the case that Afghanistan is the most corrupt government in the world.
• The October 29, 2010 issue of The Week magazine contained an article that reviewed the recent elections that were held throughout Afghanistan. According to the article, election fraud was so widespread that almost 25% of the ballots representing over one million votes have been thrown. Reasons for invalidating so many ballots included ballot box stuffing, vote buying, and intimidation by armed thugs that prevented people from getting to voting stations.
• According to a short article that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times last week, The Defense Department, the State Department, and the U.S. Agency For International development, who spend the most U.S. taxpayer money on Afghanistan reconstruction projects, cannot easily show where they spent their taxpayer budget dollars. The do not track the money the pay contractors in any kind of shared database according a special inspector general, which is important since between 2007 and 2009, almost 7,000 contractors received almost $18 billion of U.S. taxpayer money. The budget processes are so bad that Afghanistan projects cannot be easily separated form other U.S. funded projects around the world. There was no mention in the article, and I have not seen any mention elsewhere, that this money is being spent efficiently and effectively, helping to rebuild Afghanistan and helping us win the war. Given the ineffectiveness of most programs run by our political class, one would probably be safe to assume that the reconstruction program is not going well while it eats up and wastes billions of taxpayer dollars.
• An article from the October 29, 2010 issue of The Week magazine reviewed how Karzai's government is actually in negotiations with the Taliban, the very forces that U.S. and NATO forces are battling every day. The general tone of those commenting in the article on these negotiations is that the fighting war we have been conducting over the past nine years cannot be won for a number of reasons, including the widespread culture of corruption that pervades the country and the fact that the Taliban know that Obama will start pulling down troop levels within a year. The most disturbing aspect of this whole fiasco, as outlined in the article, is an accusation that the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, is really an ally of the Taliban and fully supports the Taliban effort despite the claim by the Pakistani government that the are our allies in the battle against terrorism. As proof, the article points out that the original leader of the Taliban, based on remarks from an unnamed NATO officer, Mullah Muhammad Omar, has not been involved in these talks since it is not in the interest of Pakistan for these talks to succeed. The unnamed source claims that the ISI protects Omar, helping him travel between the cities of Quetta and Karachi. The article also asserts that the ISI is likely actively protecting Osama Bin Laden and his closest advisors in homes in northwest Pakistan and that "nobody in al Qaida is living in a cave."

What a mess. Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars wasted on reconstruction projects that are either non-existent or noneffective, inadequate government budget controls and tracking, a corrupt government that does not show any urgency to become uncorrupt, fraudulent elections, our Afghan allies cozying up to our enemy (Iran) and our Pakistani allies that are trying to control the events in Afghanistan to their benefit, not ours, while they protect our two most hunted enemies, Omar and Bin Laden.

This all adds up to the growing feeling that we will  not be able to win militarily anytime soon and that Obama's deadline for withdrawal will only sustain the Taliban and their associated terrorists until we leave. One gets the feeling that we are heading towards a Vietnam ending. In that situation we got the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese to negotiate a settlement, allowing the U.S. to pull out, fully knowing that the settlement was good for as long as the North Vietnamese held off attacking and taking over the South. Once they attacked, the settlement was useless. Same scenario here: Karzai and the Taliban will enter into some type of agreement, giving the U.S. and NATO a window for withdrawal, at which point the Taliban will restore themselves to power a decade after we ran them out of town. The settlement will be useless.

Thus, we will have come full circle to where we were in 2001: Omar running the country, Bin Laden being given safe haven and Pakistan, our supposed ally, pulling the strings. The only difference would have been the untold billions of dollars wasted and the thousands of young American killed and wounded. What a mess.

One can only debate what would have happened if the political class had had some degree of focus in this mess. Bush threw the Taliban out of office but then lost focus and allowed them to rearm and grow while he launched the disaster that is Iraq. I wonder what would have happened if Obama had spent half as much effort on Afghanistan as he as spent over the past month trying to get fellow Democrats elected. No focus on anybody's part and brave Americans have died as a result.

The political class needs to make a hard decision, something that they have never been very good at. Our politicians either need to go all in and try to win the war, understanding the Pakistan is not our ally and making the necessary adjustments to our relationship and that Karzai will continue to play us for fools as long as we allow him to run the second most corrupt country in the world. If we are not willing to stomach those types of changes, then we should get out of the country tomorrow, saving lives and taxpayers' money in the process. It would be messy but to continue the current state of mess is like death by a thousand cuts and the end result will be the same, we leave the country and the Taliban come back into power.

We can only hope that our politicians thoroughly think through a future situation before they commit us militarily again, anywhere in the world. We cannot afford the cost in dollars and lives when a political class does not fully commit to a well thought out, focused, finite plan.



Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.



Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/