Afghan Fiction

After seven years involvement in Afghanistan, no improvements are apparent in the country. Because of domestic politics, however, the government lacks the honesty to do anything about it.

The German government can be thankful these days that their only involvement with the Taliban has been settled in the boardrooms of German business. In view of Germany’s extension of military involvement in Afghanistan, if it weren’t for the financial crisis, the coalition government would be forced to deal with the biggest foreign policy question threatening the nation and its allies to date.

The crises in Russia and the European Union are completely different from opposing the Taliban in the Hindu-Kush, which actually poses an imminent danger – even deadly danger – for the 3000 and soon to be more soldiers who have a right to know what policies the German government, the United States, NATO, the Afghan government and all the other players will be pushing.

The answer is that there is no answer. After seven years of war, occupation and reconstruction, the nation shows no signs of improvement. Security, political stability and economic progress – the three necessities for any proposed future withdrawal – are so far only fleeting accomplishments.

A frightening existence

When the Taliban is driven out of one area of Helmand province, they pop up again in neighboring Kandahar province. If one tribe adopts one security plan, two valleys further away the competing tribe wants also to profit from the blessings of the occupying power – or it continues to cultivate opium poppies.

The engagement in Afghanistan has meanwhile taken on a frightening life of its own. In Germany’s eyes, there is a good engagement (ISAF and the German military) and a bad engagement (Operation Enduring Freedom and the pursuit of terrorists); there are good soldiers who call themselves reconstruction helpers, and bad soldiers who fight skirmishes in the southern part of the country and lately attack the root of all evil in Pakistan.

There’s a good President Hamid Karzai who eloquently represents the nation on the world stage and welcomes foreign dignitaries and who has already lost many of his soldiers in battle against the Taliban. And there’s the bad Hamid Karzai, who has a dubious record against the drug cartels and who remains, in any case, nothing more than a better mayor of Kabul. Since the death of an Afghan family in August at the hands of a German soldier, there’s now even good civilians and bad civilians – grotesque.

The mission suffers from the fact that, on the one hand, it has been stylized as an example of NATO’s determination while on the other it has to act in another world: too distant, too foreign, to abstract to have any meaning for voters in either Minneapolis or Munich.

For NATO, for the U.S. President and for the German government, Afghanistan has understandable strategic meaning. For the soldiers on the ground, it has become a never-ending labor of Sisyphus involving life and death.

Whoever wishes to save Afghanistan and spare a military debacle has to risk radical steps in the eighth year of involvement. First, the division of missions and the nonsensical disparity in military involvement have to be done away with. Those in the German parliament who support such a fiction deceive only themselves while doing our troops there a disservice.

Incompetence and poor organization

Secondly, far too much money is wasted through incompetence and poor organization. Valuable resources are wasted in the chaos of assistance when there is no guiding hand. The recently appointed Head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, is a disappointment who is hardly making his involvement felt. The British politician Paddy Ashdown would have been a far better choice but was not appointed because of Karzai’s opposition to him.

Because of all this, there’s one lesson to be learned: the international community has to take Karzai less seriously because true power in Afghanistan lies, now as before, in the provinces and with the tribal leaders. Afghanistan demands endurance, and as every marathon runner knows, he who neglects to control and pace himself might as well never begin the race.