File Photo: Afghan farmers work in an opium poppy field in Nawa district of Helmand province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan (April 25, 2009). (AP Photo/Abdul Khaleq)


I read a lot of commentary about the war and reconstruction in Afghanistan... far more than I probably need to. So much of what I read treats the problems of Afghanistan as if they originated from within the discrete territorial boundaries of the country. There is often a tone of frustration among Western pundits as if they were discussing the antics of an incorrigible child. This is a highly deceptive mode of analysis.

The three most important issues (i.e., drugs, corruption, and the insurgency) cannot be understood without looking outside the boundaries of the country. The production of heroin would not be such an issue if there were no demand in Europe and America. The crop is grown to earn hard currency, plain and simple. Similarly, the issue of corruption in the Kabul government is in part due to the overwhelming amounts of aid provided by international community. Aid is necessary to rebuild a war ravaged country, but to provide more aid than a developing country can productively absorb is a recipe for corruption. One should also question the neat line drawn between the puppet Afghan government and its foreign supporters. Finally, it is well known that the Taliban were strengthened and supported in their rise to power by the ISI of Pakistan. Even today, the insurgency would have little chance to survive without foreign sources of funding and the permeable border with Pakistan.

I have only read one intelligent article on this issue and not surprisingly it is written by an Afghan, Nushin Arbabzadah:

"As local wisdom has it, there are three types of people in Afghanistan today: al-Qaida (the fighters), al-faida (the enriched) and al-gaida (the fucked). Most Afghans belong to the third category.

From the perspective of Afghans on the ground, the west is part of this machinery of corruption which thrives on the continuation of the current situation. If the Afghan leadership is corrupt and incompetent, so is the western leadership involved in Afghanistan. If Afghan warlords ignore international standards of warfare and engage in torture, so does the US in Bagram and Guantánamo. If the Taliban endanger civilian lives by suicide attacks, so do the foreign troops by carrying out reckless air strikes. The lines between the bad and the good, the problem and the problem-solvers, have become blurred. Moreover, the problem-solvers have themselves become part of the problem; they are costly but ineffective. Every little project, from digging a well to conducting a research project, involves hiring an entourage of armed security guards.

Far from disarming the many Afghan militia gangs, the current intervention has created a new set of armed men who are highly trained and well-equipped. Their daytime job is to protect foreign problem-solvers. But in their spare time, they run their own criminal businesses, robbing and intimidating locals and recently, even killing a government official.

The local population are capable of doing many of the projects for a fraction of the cost (and without a single bodyguard) but they are not being employed. The civilian and military problem-solvers are cut off from the population they are supposed to help. They talk to each other but not to Afghans, unless the Afghans in question are part of the English-speaking elite. In the words of an MEP who I met recently, "We have good ideas; the only thing missing is the Afghans themselves."

From a local perspective, Afghanistan has become a laboratory where a disparate set of international military and civilian problem-solvers and their Afghan colleagues are trying out and dropping various ideas and making a comfortable living out of it. Not everyone is starving in Afghanistan. The al-faida are doing well."

At the end of the day, the Western countries are in Afghanistan not out of charity but because those states cannot adequately sustain their sovereignty from within their territorial boundaries. Unable to control the demand for illicit drugs, they must move to control the source. Unable to demobilize from the second world war, they must find new enemies. Unable to defend against asymmetric warfare, they must root out the terrorists' safe havens. This war stems from the weakness of the West as much as anarchy unleashed in Afghanistan after thirty years of war.

It is important to see this weakness in order to understand that Afghanistan is not just a problem to be fixed by Westerners or a laboratory for half-baked Western ideas on state and society building. The weakness of the West is complicit in prolonging this conflict and re-producing the problems it tries to solve. Weakness leads to underfunded troops, inadequate detention facilities, and opium crop eradication programs. This weakness is, at least in part, why the problems of Afghanistan have yet to be fixed.

Labels: afghanistan, corruption, heroin, south asia, taliban