The West Has Failed in Afghanistan

The efforts of NATO countries to try to save the military campaign in Afghanistan come too late. Not even withdrawal can solve the problems.

There’s the nearly 70-year-old man who has spent the greatest part of the past 15 years behind bars. First, the radical Islamic Taliban militia arrested him. Then he spent time at Guantanamo because envious neighbors denounced him to the U.S. military. A few months after he was set free, the old man found himself back behind bars at Bagram Airbase: the same neighbors (who still had close ties to American troops) made the same dubious claims to the same military people. Now the same U.S. attorney who got the old man out of Guantanamo is working to get him released from Bagram. His relatives only know one thing for certain: they’re always turned away by sullen U.S. troops every time they try to get into a U.S. military facility to plead for his release.

That’s a good example of the arbitrariness Afghans now suffer since the Taliban was driven out in 2001 and foreign troops and diplomats moved in. Justice and protection of human rights is just as foreign to the old man’s family as it is to the young journalist near the northern Afghan city of Kundus. He describes the harassment by authorities, the arbitrariness of the security personnel, as well as the supreme power of the provincial government and its business partners. The young man asks himself why the German military and development workers in Kundus have anything whatsoever to do with the corrupt rulers there. The way he sees it, the German army cannot or will not prevent the Taliban from once again putting the entire region around Kundus under their rule of terror.

Many Afghans care less about the number of schools the West has built to measure the success of foreign involvement in the Hindu Kush than they do about the number of promises the West has made and not kept. The West fails to measure up at this level as well. Security? In 34 of the 35 Afghan provinces, the Taliban functions as if it were a shadow government; that determination comes from data supplied by the international military force, ISAF, itself. In addition, the West is making deals with people who have little or no credibility with the general public. Economic development? Afghan big shots are pouring millions received from the West into their own personal bank accounts in Dubai, but the average person has seen no economic change during the eight years of the occupation.

Democracy? The West supports Hamid Karzai, a president that governs using the same dishonest means as his predecessors of the last 30 years. And now politicians from Berlin to Washington are telling us that the higher principles of western democracy will never work in Afghanistan. That’s the sort of thing one hears from a quack doctor who treats a patient with the wrong medicine for years and then blames the patient for not responding to treatment.

Afghan trust in the West has been so severely damaged that neither a massive troop surge nor the continued infusion of billions of dollars will be able to accomplish the goal President Barack Obama has set. The hearts and minds of people in the Hindu Kush have to be won over first, but those hearts and minds have been lost forever during the last eight years. Every foreign soldier now killed in the Hindu Kush only dies to preserve the status quo. Every dollar or euro spent serves only to keep everything more or less the same as it is now.

The failure in Afghanistan has maneuvered the West into a dilemma: even withdrawal is no longer a viable alternative. There are now so many bills falling due that there’s bound to be a national bloodbath similar to the one that took place in Rwanda in the mid-nineties. The West simply averted its eyes from that holocaust, but NATO will be unable to duck its responsibilities this time. After withdrawal, the NATO states will have to absorb hundreds of thousands if not millions of Afghans to save them from the vengeance of the Taliban militias.

Massive increases and expansion of Afghan security forces will be unable to do anything to prevent that. For one thing, the Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan won’t join any military forces. For another thing, every Afghan knows that police and military personnel have been putting their savings into foreign banks. When they have to look out for themselves, they’ll be among the first to cut and run, leaving the country and its defenders at the mercy of the Taliban militias. Neither should the West harbor any illusions about the intentions of the radical Islamic warriors of god. They think in terms of generations.

The Afghanistan Conference planned for late January will also be unable to solve the West’s dilemma. The recipe calling for more money prescribed by western diplomacy doesn’t work. Because of the complex mélange of tribes and loyalties, most of the aid will never reach the Afghans who most need it.

If there’s any hope of escaping this dilemma at all, this is it: each and every individual contract, every partner, every cooperative venture and every project has to be closely examined to determine and understand any possible political ramifications. There can be no more shady deals that merely serve political opportunism or propaganda purposes. Foreigners will only regain the respect of the Afghans provided they seriously stick to those principles they practice in their own countries.