OPINION:
Last month, I arrived at Kabul International Airport. Walking toward the car, I asked Jawed, the porter, what people thought about the ongoing negotiations between the United States and the Taliban. With a puzzled look he said: “I’m not an educated man and don’t understand what’s going on. What simple folks think is that the fire under the caldron has been set, but no one seems to know where to find a fitting cover for it.”
“You looked surprised I asked you about the situation,” I said.
“I couldn’t believe you would ask me,” Jawed said. “People with money and importance don’t care to know what we think.”
“I’m neither with money nor important,” I said.
“You’re from America,” he said. “You look rich.”
As I later went into longer, deeper conversations with “people of money and importance,” I realized that that self-declared “not an educated man” was absolutely right. I didn’t find a single person who convincingly suggested a way to end the Afghan conflict without it collapsing into civil war.
Modern policymakers and bureaucrats who consider themselves to be knowledgeable realists have concluded that more than a trillion dollars was wasted on a people whose unimaginable poverty, primordial social conditions and rugged, unforgiving countryside have rendered them mentally, physically and philosophically impregnable. They determined it’s time to bite the bitter pill, accept defeat and sue for peace — albeit an expensive peace, both in blood and treasure.
They’ve forgotten they’re dealing with a region of paranoia and conspiracies, of complete lack of functioning governance, institutions existing in name only, law represented and enforced by corrupt political elites, strong men with their own mini armies, and an uneducated, silent majority who simply glance about their profoundly deprived lives with wide eyes and incomprehensible minds.
From Washington’s misadventures in Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, its clear that America still does not understand the third world. As a nation with global responsibilities, it’s high time that we figure it out.
When U.S. forces entered Afghanistan, a far-off country most Americans had hardly heard of, policymakers didn’t comprehend the depth of the country’s poverty and backwardness. Had they been aware of its true conditions, Washington might have decided differently.
But now, America has been occupying Afghanistan for 18 years. In the context of its global responsibilities and international credibility, the United States should carefully deliberate the side effects of its action before leaving Afghanistan to its own devices.
Washington should not commit the same mistake it made in the early 1990s. Considering America’s astonishing limited knowledge of the Afghan psyche, U.S. leaders should meticulously study the people who are advising them in Afghanistan matters. It was mainly Afghan-Americans who led the international effort to form a post-Taliban Afghanistan government. They and their Afghan cronies passed the nation into the bloody hands of warlords and drug kingpins, creating a disaster that dogs Washington today.
As a result, Afghanistan’s politics became a messy, corrupted enterprise. Before assuming the leadership of post-Taliban Afghanistan, most had lived and thrived in mayhem, chaos and lawlessness. They neither understood nor had any appreciation for the rule of law, finding the power of institutions bothersome and so they simply did without them. As they became richer and more powerful, these men considered themselves the personification of the law. They didn’t govern the country; they reigned over it with their own interpretations of right and wrong.
The one thing they lacked was the evaluation of submitted bids and the choice of bidders to award large contracts to for rebuilding the country’s shattered infrastructure. That job had been reserved for foreign experts who had been hired by the international donor community.
But eventually that too would fall. The 2005 London donor conference was used by the Karzai government to usurp the decision-making process for the economic rehabilitation of the country and take it into its own hands.
This gave former President Hamid Karzai and his supporters complete control over the financing of Afghanistan’s reconstruction and the awarding of major contracts to companies of their choice. Fortuitously for the regime and its friends, that was the timeframe when the donor institutions and governments had reached consensus to open their purses much wider in providing funding for Afghan infrastructure reconstruction.
As we now know, little of real consequence and long-term value was actually created with the massive monies that flowed into the country. The general population remains at the same level of poverty, but with the help of that corruption, Afghanistan got its first class of post-Taliban multi-millionaires.
Real change, not mere rhetoric, must take place if the United States is to ever leave behind an Afghanistan that continues to function at mere survival level without it falling back into violence and cruelty.
The present U.S.-Taliban negotiations will probably not succeed. The philosophical worldview of the post-Taliban political elite and today’s Taliban is too far apart as to allow them to agree on a power-sharing model.
To expect the United States to get rid of Afghanistan’s ruling elite is asking too much of Washington. The only workable model is to absorb the cost of maintaining and protecting the Afghan political system, but denying it the management and reconstruction of the country’s economy and taking direct charge of infrastructure rehabilitation until Afghanistan stands on its own economically.
This would take roughly five years and up to $50 billion, but only then should the United States withdraw, knowing it did its best to leave behind a functioning country — at least functioning enough not to slip into mayhem.
• Nasir Shansab is the author of “Silent Trees: Power and Passion in War-Torn Afghanistan.”
Please read our comment policy before commenting.