Losing Afghanistan

Reading alot about Iraq in the headlines, I didn't quite realize just how bad the situation is Afghanistan. According to this sobering article in Foreign Affairs, the Taliban is resurgent, conducting attacks with increasing sophistication (often using methods imported from Iraq), erecting a system of courts parallel to the government's, and openly operating out of Quetta, a provincial capital in Pakistan. Here's the kicker: Pakistan's intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is actively supporting the Taliban leadership.

Concludes Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria: "Afghanistan is in danger of becoming a version of Iraq, where the central government has collapsed, disorder is rife and a Qaeda-backed insurgency controls large swathes of the country."

The problem? Not enough troops and equipment. And the NATO-led troops that are there often have to operate under crippling rules of engagement that their individual countries impose upon them. As this op-ed in the Financial Times explains, even after the most recent NATO summit in Riga, only the Americans, British, Canadians, Dutch and Australians are allowed to fight in the most dangerous areas of Aghanistan--countries like Germany, France, Italy and Spain have only agreed to enter these areas to assist allies in the case of an "emergency."

But the problems aren't just military. Other indications suggest that the international aid operation is just as big of a disaster. The Foreign Affairs piece refers to "poorly designed and coordinated technical assistance," and donor organizations that insist on sending their own technical advisers from abroad that are clueless to the conditions on the ground.

I read the most blistering critique of the aid operation in Afghanistan in The Places in Between, a brilliant book written by a young Scotsman, Rory Stewart, who had the gall (and something else that rhymes with "gall") to walk across Afghanistan in January 2001, just weeks after the Taliban fell. As someone who was thoroughly familiar with Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages and cultures, Stewart had this to say about the flood of young aid administrators and bureaucrats who entered Afghanistan:

...They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, with at least two degrees--often in international law, economics, or development. They came from middle-class backgrounds in Western countries, and in the evenings, they dined with each other and swapped anecdotes about corruption in the government and the incompetence of the United Nations. They rarely drove their SUVs outside Kabul because their security advisers forbade it.

Some...were experienced and well informed about conditions in rural Afghanistan. But they were barely fifty out of many thousands. Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived... [They] did not have the time, structures, or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist.

Stewart packs the harshest and certainly most "gallsy" part of his critique in a footnote, where he states:

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation...

Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed... In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.

Whew. (It is important to know that after Afghanistan, Stewart put his money where his mouth was and served as a deputy provincial governor of Amarah and Nasiriyah after the Iraq invasion.) More troops may be on their way to Kabul, but the sort of problems described by Stewart will take much longer to fix.

Postscript: I would highly recommend Stewart's book. The section I quoted is perhaps the only "political" part; the rest is a beautiful and at times riveting travelogue. One moment he is commenting on the possible provenance of a mysterious ancient minaret; the next he is talking his way out of getting shot because his old adopted Aimaq fighting dog is considered unclean. A quick and enlightening read.