Failing Afghanistan

Failing Afghanistan
September 9, 2006: Boston Globe

EDITORIAL: IT WILL BE five years in December since the United States, in conjunction with ethnic militias in Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, routed the Taliban from power and promised Afghans an advent of peace, democracy, and the reconstruction of their war-shattered country. Today in large areas of Afghanistan there is renewed warfare, corrupt or ineffectual governance, and hope-destroying poverty untouched by misspent foreign aid.

Many have contributed to Afghanistan's agony. Notwithstanding a promise Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf made Wednesday during a visit to Kabul to ``fight Talibanization," Pakistan continues to harbor fighters from the Taliban movement that Pakistan's military intelligence originally midwifed. Corrupt warlords bear responsibility for increased poppy production. And Taliban fanatics who are killing teachers in girls' schools and beheading foreign aid workers remain the scourge of the Afghan populace.

President Bush and his policy makers nevertheless deserve a large part of the blame for what they failed to do -- or did wrong -- after toppling the Taliban. The most salient reason for their failure to rehabilitate Afghanistan has been a doctrinal blindness to Afghan realities coupled with an ideological fixation on the superiority of the private sector.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected proposals from former Secretary of State Colin Powell for a hefty force of armed US and European peacekeepers that, in 2002 and early 2003, might have provided Afghans the security they needed -- and deserved.

Instead, a small force was assigned to Kabul while 8,000 US troops hunted Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the southern and eastern provinces. The populace went unprotected, and eventually the Taliban were able to return to impoverished areas misruled by warlords. Consequently, NATO troops today are taking unexpected casualties in the southern provinces and US warplanes are killing innocent civilians in hundreds of bombing runs meant to kill Taliban fighters.

Similar to Rumsfeld's refusal to commit sufficient troops for postwar security was the practice of spending a substantial share of US reconstruction funds on private US contractors and technical experts. In 2002, the US devoted $909 million to rebuilding Afghanistan, a figure that leapt to $4.8 billion in 2005. If less of that money had been spent on US contractors, more could have been distributed by President Hamid Karzai's government in job-creating public works, and more could have been done to help the population and enhance the authority of the central government.

Because of these blunders, the price in blood and treasure of preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a failed state is much higher than it ever should have been.