We have blogged previously on why the Nato involvement in Afghanistan is almost certainly doomed to fail. Al Jazeera recently updated what is happening "on the ground" which is not being widely reported in the West.
We take no pleasure in these things--but wonder how long it will take simplistic fools in the West to learn that the Gospel and an inheritance of Christian culture anything goes, and usually does. Human loyalties in Afghanistan are not to law, justice, ethics, fairness, liberty, and human dignity but to one's tribe. You cannot build a westernised nation on such a foundation. Western armed involvement will only make things much, much worse in the long run.
Here is a summary of the Al Jazeera article's salient points:
Instability in Afghanistan has "levelled off" but the Taliban has not lost any real ground. It appears able to launch attacks when and where it chooses.
The Afghani government is hopelessly corrupt.
The corruption in Afghanistan's government is well-documented. The United Nations said in January that Afghans paid roughly $2.5bn in bribes in 2009 - roughly one-quarter of the country's gross domestic product.
Karzai's government has approved a handful of reforms aimed at curbing that corruption - establishing an anti-corruption unit in the attorney general's office, for example. But their impact has so far been limited with 83 per cent of Afghans saying their daily lives are still affected by government corruption, according to a March 2010 survey.
Not one district supports the Afghani government.
The US defence department surveyed 92 districts to gauge their feelings towards the government.
Not one district supported it, and only 44 expressed even a neutral opinion. The rest were sympathetic to the Taliban. Rampant corruption helps contribute to that widespread mistrust of the Afghan government, the report found.
Imposed government from the top has little or no local support.
>One reason for the corruption and inefficiency, according to the Center for American Progress ("CAP") study, is that the US and Nato have largely dictated the structure of the Afghan government - without significant input from the Afghan people.
"The corruption ... [is] the result of a government structure shaped by international as well as domestic political actors' behaviours and policies," the CAP report said. This has created what the authors, Caroline Wadhams and Colin Cookman, call an overly-centralised government that depends largely on one man: Hamid Karzai.
"All roads currently lead back to President Karzai, who directly appoints more than 1,000 government officials throughout the country and many more positions indirectly," CAP wrote. As a result, Karzai has few incentives to approve the kind of meaningful changes that would reduce corruption and improve governance.
The US is "empowering" local groups, only to create greater inter-tribal violence.
US and Nato commanders have eagerly endorsed a programme called the "Local Defence Initiative," which arms local groups as a supplement to the national army and police. Karzai - along with Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul - objected strongly to the measure.
Both men feared it would create unaccountable militiasthat ran amok and undermined the central government. The US implemented the plan anyway, over Karzai's objections. Early indications suggest that Karzai's concerns were well-founded.
Nato's decision to arm one such group, comprised of members of the Shinwari tribe in Nangarhar province, has resulted in tribal infightingthat has killed more than a dozen people. And the armed group has done little to reduce the Taliban's presence in Nangarhar.
"In the interest of immediate results [the US] regularly bypass[es] the government in favour of key local powerbrokers," the CAP report noted.
"No quick fix for long-term stability exists, however... [and] circumvention ultimately weakens the government."
So, in summary, the Afghani-Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt and dependant upon one man--Karzai himself. It enjoys little or no local constituency support. But attempts to by-pass Karzai and go "direct" to the people end up creating greater tribal divisions and violence.
Conventional wisdom says that if you have dug yourself into a hole, stop digging. But the US and Nato have decided that they are such miracle workers they can ignore all the muck in the hole, and that they can magically fix it, and have therefore decided to dig with a vengeance. Great will be the eventual collapse of the whole misguided enterprise.
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