Count the ways that inequality is being increased in Kabul.
On the one hand, powerful oligarchs in government benefit from government corruption. Militias, government officials and gangs control some of the profiable parts of poppy/opium distribution. Those with wealth and connections who have the power to acquire land through force and dispossession, and through massive evictions.
On the other hand, the growing number of poor are forced to survive by creating illegal shanty towns, squatter settlements, and slums, by scrambling to earn a little cash in the informal economy admist high rates of uenemployment and in an overall situations where there is little assistance from the government and where access to NGOs is problematic. The inequality grows across many parts of the country, as US and NATO forces give overwhelming priority to seeking out and trying to kill or capture the Taliban and other insurgents, dropping bombs, and generating chaos that drives yet additional Afghans out of their homes and towns to become refugees, who then wind up living in dismal and seriously under-provisioned camps.
The following article provides further information on the intensified polarization going on in Kabul.
AFGHANISTAN: Mansions amid poverty
19 May 2010 18:18:43 GMT 19 May 2010
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/IRIN/63143f556015f2f3e321065c159687d5.htm
[....]
KABUL, 19 May 2010 (IRIN) - Almost seven years after dozens of poor families were evicted from the suburb of Shirpur in central Kabul where they had lived for decades, they have still not got justice, and the new mansions which have taken their place underline the yawning gap between the haves and the have-nots.
The former shanty town has become a symbol of wealth, affluence and some say decadence, in the second least developed country in the world. Many Afghans mockingly call it "Shirchoor" (lion-grabbing), as it contains many of the city's most outlandish buildings - generally owned by current and former ministers, warlords and other powerful individuals.
A UN special rapporteur, Miloon Kothari, who investigated the Shirpur case in 2003, said in a report: [http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/0/BC10EB9D755A5D8FC1256F5B004A7D97?opendocument] "Notwithstanding the legal considerations as to property rights in this case, I expressed the view that the way in which the forced evictions took place, including excessive use of force, amounted to serious human rights violations."
The spread of Shirpur's mansions, however, can nowhere near keep pace with the mushrooming squatter settlements and slums in and around Kabul where, according to the Ministry of Urban Development, illegal urbanization and land grabbing [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=75508] have been going on for years.
"Shirpur is a small sign of the huge crisis of disparity between the rich and the poor in this country," Kabir Ranjbar, a representative of Kabul in the lower house of parliament, told IRIN.
"The rich are powerful and have manipulated everything to their benefit, while the poor are weak and have been marginalized and deprived of their basic rights," he said.
Ranjbar's concerns were echoed, albeit more modestly, by Abdul Rahman Ghafoory, director of the Central Statistics Office (CSO): "Gaps between rich and poor are widening."
He based the remark [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88732] on a National Risks and Vulnerability Assessment which says nine million Afghans (36 percent of the population) live in absolute poverty, and five million "non-poor" live on less than US$2 a day.
Unevenly distributed wealth
Over the past eight years Afghanistan has seen an unprecedented injection of funds for rebuilding and development, thanks to the generosity and strategic interests of donors.
Despite worsening security, the country has made strong macroeconomic progress, achieving a record rise of 22.5 percent in its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009-2010, according to the World Bank.
[http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWFiles2010.nsf/FilesByRWDocUnidFilename/EGUA-85CR2C-full_report.pdf/$File/full_report.pdf]
However, the benefits have not been equally distributed, experts and aid workers say.
"The rich have become richer and more powerful while the majority of poor have been marginalized," said Sayed Masoud, an economics lecturer at Kabul University, adding that the aid-inspired GDP growth had been "hijacked by oligarchs".
"Economic growth can help alleviate poverty - but it can also exacerbate inequality, with only a few benefiting from newfound wealth. To some extent, this is what we are seeing in Afghanistan. While entrepreneurs and new businesses, particularly those based around the aid industry, have flourished, many - especially the poor and those in rural areas - have seen few positive benefits," said Ashley Jackson, head of policy and advocacy for Oxfam in Afghanistan.
Risk of social unrest?
According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime: [http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/frontpage/2010/January/corruption-widespread-in-afghanistan-unodc-survey-says.html] "Unprecedented resource flows have created a new cast of rich and powerful individuals who operate outside the traditional power/tribal structures and bid the cost of favours and loyalty to levels not compatible with the under-developed nature of the country."
Pervasive corruption and the abuse of weak state structures by the wealthy and powerful undermine justice and the rule of law, [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=89078] and fuel dangerous grievances, expert say.
Officials in the Ministry of Urban Development and Kabul Municipality say up to 70 percent of new high-rise buildings in the capital are illegal and built without regard to local laws or regulations by powerful individuals known as the "land mafia".
The Ministry of Agriculture says up to a million hectares of state land has been seized by militia commanders and powerful warlords across the country in the past few years.
"Social unrest, violence and rebellion against the state are the most likely outcomes in a society where a majority of people live in extreme poverty but small elite groups thrive in affluence," said Masoud of Kabul University, adding that social justice was a prerequisite for peace-making in war-torn Afghanistan.
"The big majority of the poor is indeed a huge problem in this country," said the CSO's Ghafoory, adding that opportunities and resources must be distributed fairly.
Almost seven years have passed since calls for transparency and justice in connection with Shirpur's evictions and land seizures, but nothing has come into the public domain.
The UN's Kothari warned in his report that a failure of justice and transparency on Shirpur would send out the wrong signals to "war lords and commanders to continue to illegally occupy land with impunity".
He was prescient, according to MP Ranjbar and lecturer Masoud.
Showing posts with label weak government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weak government. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Widespread corruption is a barrier to development in Afghanistan
Dr. James C. Dabhi's argues in the following article that Afghan society is plagued by widespread bribes and corruption, especially in all levels of the government. Dabhi presents evidence from Integrity Watch Afghanistan, interviews with UN officials, and information from a Toronto Star report, to document his analysis. He contends that democracy is weak in Afghanistan and is "concentrated within the elite class and family network." While necessary to the development of democracy, civil society remains weak while many parts of academia are "not free from corruption and nepotism." Two implications of Dabhi's analysis are that there are at present no Afghan forces powerful enough to challenge government corruption and the US-led occupation has been unable to reduce it.
Bribe and corruption violate people’s right to development in Afghanistan
Dr. James C. Dabhi
July 20, 2010 - http://www.aopnews.com/opinion/dabhi_corruption.shtml
Bribe and corruption are not new to south Asian countries; Afghanistan may be topping the list. Some may say it is a way of life here. Bribe and corruption are haraam (an Arabic term meaning forbidden) but people in power and position thrive on it.
Afghan and foreign officials have been under attack for being corrupt. There have been public charges blaming each other for the rampant corruption surrounding aid spending. Afghan officials say most of the corruption is due to the fact that foreign contractors and NGOs control the aid. Afghan Justice Minister Habibullah Ghalib recently told reporters in Kabul, "The foreigners come here and wipe their dirty hands on our clean clothes." But international officials generally defend the foreign NGOs' record and transparency. They argue that the international aid is generally well spent and there are good audit controls in place to ensure that it meets the needs of the people.
Eliminating corruption has become the top priority for the government in Afghanistan and it will be an issue discussed in Kabul conference. The agenda if translated into to action has a huge political and economic implication for those who reap the benefits of corruption (in Afghanistan and outside). Therefore scepticism among the masses about the political-will of the higher ups in implementing the agenda is understandable.
According to a recent survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, the average Afghan household pays out an estimated $100 US in petty bribes every year. With approximately 70 percent of the population surviving on less than $1 US per day, the burden on families is enormous. A staggering sum of $100-250 million USD is paid in bribes every year. To put it in relevant terms, this is equivalent to half the national development budget for 2006. Rupert Colville of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported, “The main conclusion is that the abuse of power is the key driver of poverty in Afghanistan”. The report says the majority of Afghans live in poverty despite the fact that some $35 billion US (£23 billion) in aid was poured into the country between 2002 and 2009. The BBC online news reported that "widespread corruption further limits access to services for a large proportion of the population". It blames Afghan officials for advancing their own interests at the expense of the general public.
Kai Eide, the new UN Special Representative in Afghanistan, said at an event, "Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic, it hurts the poorest people disproportionately, pushes people away from the state and undermines our joint efforts to build peace, stability and progress for Afghanistan's peoples.” He also went on to say that government corruption must be tackled from the bottom up with the people, Afghan civil society and the media having a crucial role in supporting government efforts.
Widespread corruption is systemic, structurally deep rooted and has gone unchallenged for years. It is systemic and structural because it not simply a few individuals taking bribes, but the entire governmental structure seems to be operating using bribes, whether it is the legislature, bureaucracy or judiciary. To illustrate the extent of the corruption, in 2008 Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno quoted Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet as saying: “They are in the central government, the provincial governments, the district centres, police stations, army garrisons, the banks, the aid agencies – not a sector of Afghan society is without contamination of corruption”.
No doubt there are a few people in the system who refuse to take bribes. But the refusal of a few, though courageous and praiseworthy, will not have much of an overall impact or bring about the desired reform.
Corrupt leaders and people of position in the system are much more dangerous than a police officer asking for a couple of dollars at the airport check-in or low-ranking official asking for a few hundred Afghanis to move your file up. Many of us get annoyed and shout at these small fry and often ignoring the big guns who are the main culprits. Those in high places have money, arms and connections, so people naturally fear for their lives when it comes to challenging high-level corruption.
Government knows who is engaging in corrupt behaviour, but it will not be easy for it to take these people to task. After all, it is difficult to hurt one’s own, isn't it? Corrupt enemies can be easily targeted, but what about friends who are corrupt? These are the ones you call upon when you need a favour. To eliminate a person is no big deal in this part of the world and it can easily be covered up with a bribe. Exposing these people through print and electronic media requires tremendous courage. It is a risky business but are there other options?
Democracy is still young in Afghanistan and not adequately comprehended by a larger population; and politicians and bureaucrats are no exception. By and large the politics here is feudal, patriarchal, concentrated with the elite class and family network. A political system based on ideology and development discourse has yet to emerge. For a civil society to flourish it must be nurtured in a democratic climate which at the moment is largely hyped by the international community in Afghanistan. This civil society barely exists in this country, and where it does it is weak. Academia is not free from corruption and nepotism either, and those in academic circles often lack the courage, commitment and leadership required to address these issues.
The civil society and the news media can be a big help in fighting corruption that is if the state allows sufficient freedom to these entities to play their role. But when the state players have such a stake in the bribery and corruption, why would they want to allow civil society and the media to be the spoiler? The media and civil society will have to begin to realise that rights are often not freely given, but have to be taken. Unless these actors collectively exercise their right to expose corruption and pursue follow up, hardly anything will change and the masses will continue to suffer.
Academia can help in the process of transformation of the country but then academia and educational institutions need to act without engaging in what is called party politics. They cannot remain apolitical and mute spectators. They need to provide some leadership through their research-based data through seminars, workshops and campaign against corruption nationwide. Let their studies support the civil society in highlighting the nature of corruption that exists and how it has violated the right to development of the masses here in Afghanistan
Unless ordinary Afghan women and men make their voices heard, corruption and nepotism will persist. In the process, hundreds of millions of dollars will be siphoned off in corruption, money that was intended for the development of the people of Afghanistan.
Dr. James C. Dabhi is a visiting Professor at Herat and Bamiyan Universities. He can be reached at jimmydabhi@gmail.com
Bribe and corruption violate people’s right to development in Afghanistan
Dr. James C. Dabhi
July 20, 2010 - http://www.aopnews.com/opinion/dabhi_corruption.shtml
Bribe and corruption are not new to south Asian countries; Afghanistan may be topping the list. Some may say it is a way of life here. Bribe and corruption are haraam (an Arabic term meaning forbidden) but people in power and position thrive on it.
Afghan and foreign officials have been under attack for being corrupt. There have been public charges blaming each other for the rampant corruption surrounding aid spending. Afghan officials say most of the corruption is due to the fact that foreign contractors and NGOs control the aid. Afghan Justice Minister Habibullah Ghalib recently told reporters in Kabul, "The foreigners come here and wipe their dirty hands on our clean clothes." But international officials generally defend the foreign NGOs' record and transparency. They argue that the international aid is generally well spent and there are good audit controls in place to ensure that it meets the needs of the people.
Eliminating corruption has become the top priority for the government in Afghanistan and it will be an issue discussed in Kabul conference. The agenda if translated into to action has a huge political and economic implication for those who reap the benefits of corruption (in Afghanistan and outside). Therefore scepticism among the masses about the political-will of the higher ups in implementing the agenda is understandable.
According to a recent survey by Integrity Watch Afghanistan, the average Afghan household pays out an estimated $100 US in petty bribes every year. With approximately 70 percent of the population surviving on less than $1 US per day, the burden on families is enormous. A staggering sum of $100-250 million USD is paid in bribes every year. To put it in relevant terms, this is equivalent to half the national development budget for 2006. Rupert Colville of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported, “The main conclusion is that the abuse of power is the key driver of poverty in Afghanistan”. The report says the majority of Afghans live in poverty despite the fact that some $35 billion US (£23 billion) in aid was poured into the country between 2002 and 2009. The BBC online news reported that "widespread corruption further limits access to services for a large proportion of the population". It blames Afghan officials for advancing their own interests at the expense of the general public.
Kai Eide, the new UN Special Representative in Afghanistan, said at an event, "Corruption in Afghanistan is endemic, it hurts the poorest people disproportionately, pushes people away from the state and undermines our joint efforts to build peace, stability and progress for Afghanistan's peoples.” He also went on to say that government corruption must be tackled from the bottom up with the people, Afghan civil society and the media having a crucial role in supporting government efforts.
Widespread corruption is systemic, structurally deep rooted and has gone unchallenged for years. It is systemic and structural because it not simply a few individuals taking bribes, but the entire governmental structure seems to be operating using bribes, whether it is the legislature, bureaucracy or judiciary. To illustrate the extent of the corruption, in 2008 Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno quoted Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabet as saying: “They are in the central government, the provincial governments, the district centres, police stations, army garrisons, the banks, the aid agencies – not a sector of Afghan society is without contamination of corruption”.
No doubt there are a few people in the system who refuse to take bribes. But the refusal of a few, though courageous and praiseworthy, will not have much of an overall impact or bring about the desired reform.
Corrupt leaders and people of position in the system are much more dangerous than a police officer asking for a couple of dollars at the airport check-in or low-ranking official asking for a few hundred Afghanis to move your file up. Many of us get annoyed and shout at these small fry and often ignoring the big guns who are the main culprits. Those in high places have money, arms and connections, so people naturally fear for their lives when it comes to challenging high-level corruption.
Government knows who is engaging in corrupt behaviour, but it will not be easy for it to take these people to task. After all, it is difficult to hurt one’s own, isn't it? Corrupt enemies can be easily targeted, but what about friends who are corrupt? These are the ones you call upon when you need a favour. To eliminate a person is no big deal in this part of the world and it can easily be covered up with a bribe. Exposing these people through print and electronic media requires tremendous courage. It is a risky business but are there other options?
Democracy is still young in Afghanistan and not adequately comprehended by a larger population; and politicians and bureaucrats are no exception. By and large the politics here is feudal, patriarchal, concentrated with the elite class and family network. A political system based on ideology and development discourse has yet to emerge. For a civil society to flourish it must be nurtured in a democratic climate which at the moment is largely hyped by the international community in Afghanistan. This civil society barely exists in this country, and where it does it is weak. Academia is not free from corruption and nepotism either, and those in academic circles often lack the courage, commitment and leadership required to address these issues.
The civil society and the news media can be a big help in fighting corruption that is if the state allows sufficient freedom to these entities to play their role. But when the state players have such a stake in the bribery and corruption, why would they want to allow civil society and the media to be the spoiler? The media and civil society will have to begin to realise that rights are often not freely given, but have to be taken. Unless these actors collectively exercise their right to expose corruption and pursue follow up, hardly anything will change and the masses will continue to suffer.
Academia can help in the process of transformation of the country but then academia and educational institutions need to act without engaging in what is called party politics. They cannot remain apolitical and mute spectators. They need to provide some leadership through their research-based data through seminars, workshops and campaign against corruption nationwide. Let their studies support the civil society in highlighting the nature of corruption that exists and how it has violated the right to development of the masses here in Afghanistan
Unless ordinary Afghan women and men make their voices heard, corruption and nepotism will persist. In the process, hundreds of millions of dollars will be siphoned off in corruption, money that was intended for the development of the people of Afghanistan.
Dr. James C. Dabhi is a visiting Professor at Herat and Bamiyan Universities. He can be reached at jimmydabhi@gmail.com
Friday, July 2, 2010
Counterinsurgency is Counterproductive
Ann Jones, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist, offers an insightful and informative, first-hand, and passionate analysis of how the US counterinsurgency policy in Afghanistan is, has been, and will continue to be a losing proposition at tremendous costs to Afghans, US troops, and further undermine the diminishing US international credibility that still exists. I found her article at http://www.zcommunications.org/counterinsurgency-down-for-the-count-in-afghanistan-by-ann-jones. The article was included there in Ann Jone's ZSpace Page. The original source of the article is Tom Dispatch.
Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan...
But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On
By Ann Jones
Source: TomDispatch
Friday, July 02, 2010
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....Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way? Let's take these one at a time.
1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?"It" is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.
I just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a "nonlethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for "protection."General McChrystal himself played both roles. As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's palace to say, "Sorry." Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.
The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders." Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road....
Many Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)
And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up -- the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population."It's only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.
Commanders have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission, and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.
[....]
....It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom George W. Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds, and mad as hell.
Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that "it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population," those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the U.S. military and President Obama.
Moreover, it's not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous restraint," as it's called) imposed by General McChrystal's version of COIN strategy....
It's also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn't working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores. To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province which they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.
Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built, and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marja -- the farming area (initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first offensive -- as "a bleeding ulcer." He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's second largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes President Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian NGOs based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow -- you guessed it -- angrier.
From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment -- right down to bottled drinking water -- from the U.S. military and selling it to the Taliban. U.S. commanders can't do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.
NATO soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. Back in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad we supported, we trained Afghan jihadists who have today become our worst enemies, and now we may be doing it again.
Factor in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special Forces' assassinations of high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good" Taliban -- that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs. But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our "good Taliban" are the worst of all.
I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides, and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.
2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing General McChrystal with Centcom commander General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus's greatest hits: his authorship of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition, and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a "success." If you can apply the word "success" to any operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petreus can find it again in Afghanistan.
But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the "lessons" of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so producing a striking set of failures. A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders -- that would be us -- but their Pashtun cousins.
Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.
3. What about the enemy strategy? How's that working?
It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus's surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own. An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. "They opened the gate," he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who's paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.
And all the while America's "partner" in this strategy, the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali. In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces, and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his "angry brothers." As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: "This is our big problem." They're talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be "partners" with.
In fact, America's silent acceptance of President Karzai's flagrantly fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes -- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won't be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.Think of what's happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In Marja, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can't and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes, and enforce "virtue." In Herat, the Ulema of the West issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort. In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol, and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes, and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban. Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side by side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by President Karzai. Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and President Obama himself as a way out.
4. If it's so bad, why can't it be stopped?
The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story. There are young progressive men and women running for Parliament in the coming September elections. There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they've made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery. There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the twenty-first century. When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other -- and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.
American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of "aid" money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a national scandal. This, too, is a process everyone knows but can't speak about because it's not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but "a contracting shop." Well, here's a flash from Afghanistan: it's still a contracting shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.
Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies. If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs, and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it? You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on. There's a little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban, and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.
It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter. Her new book, War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on her next book about what happens when America's wars come home. To visit her website, click here.[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).]
Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan...
But the War Machine Grinds On and On and On
By Ann Jones
Source: TomDispatch
Friday, July 02, 2010
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....Why, when President Obama fires an insubordinate and failing general, does he cling to his failing war policy? And if our strategy isn't working, what about the enemy's? And if nothing much is working, why does it still go on nonstop this way? Let's take these one at a time.
1. What do you mean by "it's not working"?"It" is counterinsurgency or COIN, which, in fact, is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy. Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of "protecting the population" above pursuing the bad guys at all cost. Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act, as I recently was reminded.
I just spent some time embedded with the U.S. Army at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border where, despite daily "sig acts" -- significant activity of a hostile nature -- virtually every "lethal" American soldier is matched by a "nonlethal" counterpart whose job it is, in one way or another, to soften up those civilians for "protection."General McChrystal himself played both roles. As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, "an amazing number of people" who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai's palace to say, "Sorry." Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.
The part of the lethal activity that often goes awry is supposed to be counterbalanced by the "sorry" part, which may be as simple as dispatching U.S. officers to drink humble tea with local "key leaders." Often enough, though, it comes in the form of large, unsustainable gifts. The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road....
Many Afghans, of course, are angry because they haven't been compensated at all, not even with a road to nowhere. Worse yet, more often than not, they've been promised things that never materialize. (If you were to summarize the history of the country as a whole in these last years, it might go like this: big men -- both Afghan and American -- make out like the Beltway Bandits many of them are, while ordinary Afghans in the countryside still wish their kids had shoes.)
And don't forget the majority of Afghans in the countryside who have scarcely been consulted at all: women. To protect Afghan women from foreign fighters, Afghan men lock them up -- the women, that is. American military leaders slip easily into the all-male comfort zone, probably relieved perhaps to try to win the "hearts and minds" of something less than half "the population."It's only in the last year or two that the Marines and the Army started pulling a few American women off their full-time non-combat jobs and sending them out as Female Engagement Teams (FETs) to meet and greet village women. As with so many innovative new plans in our counterinsurgency war, this one was cobbled together in a thoughtless way that risked lives and almost guaranteed failure.
Commanders have casually sent noncombatant American women soldiers -- supply clerks and radio operators -- outside the wire, usually with little training, no clear mission, and no follow up. Predictably, like their male counterparts, they have left a trail of good intentions and broken promises behind. So when I went out to meet village women near the Pakistan border last week with a brand-new Army FET-in-training, we faced the fury of Pashto women still waiting for a promised delivery of vegetable seeds.
[....]
....It turns out that the women of Afghanistan, whom George W. Bush claimed to have liberated so many years ago, are still mostly oppressed, impoverished, malnourished, uneducated, short of seeds, and mad as hell.
Count them among a plentiful crew of angry Afghans who are living proof that "it's not working" at all. Afghans, it seems, know the difference between genuine apologies and bribes, true commitment and false promises, generosity and self-interest. And since the whole point of COIN is to gain the hearts and minds of "the population," those angry Afghans are a bad omen for the U.S. military and President Obama.
Moreover, it's not working for a significant subgroup of Americans in Afghanistan either: combat soldiers. I've heard infantrymen place the blame for a buddy's combat injury or death on the strict rules of engagement ("courageous restraint," as it's called) imposed by General McChrystal's version of COIN strategy....
It's also clear that even the lethal part of counterinsurgency isn't working. Consider all those civilian deaths and injuries, so often the result of false information fed to Americans to entice them to settle local scores. To give just one example: American troops recently pitched hand grenades into a house in Logar Province which they'd been told was used by terrorists. Another case of false information. It held a young Afghan, a relative of an Afghan agricultural expert who happens to be an acquaintance of mine. The young man had just completed his religious education and returned to the village to become its sole maulawi, or religious teacher. The villagers, very upset, turned out to vouch for him, and the Army hospitalized him with profuse apologies. Luckily, he survived, but such routine mistakes regularly leave dead or wounded civilians and a thickening residue of rage behind.
Reports coming in from observers and colleagues in areas of the Pashtun south, once scheduled to be demonstration sites for McChrystal's cleared, held, built, and better-governed Afghanistan, are generally grim. Before his resignation, the general himself was already referring to Marja -- the farming area (initially trumpeted as a "city of 80,000 people") where he launched his first offensive -- as "a bleeding ulcer." He also delayed the highly publicized advance into Kandahar, the country's second largest city, supposedly to gain more time to bring around the opposing populace, which includes President Karzai. Meanwhile, humanitarian NGOs based in Kandahar complain that they can't do their routine work assisting the city's inhabitants while the area lies under threat of combat. Without assistance, Kandaharis grow -- you guessed it -- angrier.
From Kandahar province, where American soldiers mass for the well-advertised securing of Kandahar, come reports that the Afghan National Army (ANA) is stealing equipment -- right down to bottled drinking water -- from the U.S. military and selling it to the Taliban. U.S. commanders can't do much about it because the official American script calls for the ANA to take over responsibility for national defense.
NATO soldiers have complained all along about the ill-trained, uninterested troops of the ANA, but the animosity between them seems to have grown deadly in some quarters. American soldiers in Kandahar report that, for their own security, they don't tell their ANA colleagues when and where they're going on patrol. Back in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet jihad we supported, we trained Afghan jihadists who have today become our worst enemies, and now we may be doing it again.
Factor in accounts of what General McChrystal did best: taking out bad guys. Reportedly, he was vigorously directing Special Forces' assassinations of high and mid-level Taliban leaders in preparation for "peeling off" the "good" Taliban -- that is, those impoverished fighters only in it for the money. According to his thinking, they would later be won over to the government through internationally subsidized jobs. But assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers -- or those we call the bad Taliban -- actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns more interested in living off the population we're supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty. From the point of view of ordinary Afghans in the countryside, our "good Taliban" are the worst of all.
I could go on. If you spend time in Afghanistan, evidence of failure is all around you, including those millions of American taxpayer dollars that are paid to Afghan security contractors (and Karzai relatives) and then handed over to insurgents to buy protection for U.S. supply convoys traveling on U.S. built, but Taliban-controlled, roads. Strategy doesn't get much worse than that: financing both sides, and every brigand in between, in hopes of a happier ending someday.
2. So why does Obama stick to this failed policy?
Go figure. Maybe he's been persuaded by Pentagon hype. Replacing General McChrystal with Centcom commander General David Petraeus brought a media golden-oldies replay of Petraeus's greatest hits: his authorship of the Army's counterinsurgency manual, updated (some say plagiarized) from a Vietnam-era edition, and of Bush's 2007 "surge" in Iraq, an exercise in sectarian cleansing now routinely called a "success." If you can apply the word "success" to any operation in Iraq, you're surely capable of clinging to the hope that Petreus can find it again in Afghanistan.
But like David McKiernan, the general he ousted, McChrystal has already misapplied the "lessons" of Iraq to the decidedly different circumstances of Afghanistan and so producing a striking set of failures. A deal to buy off the Shinwari Pashtuns, for instance, a tribe mistakenly thought to be the equivalent of the Anbar Sunnis in Iraq, ended in an uproar when they pocketed the money without firing a shot at a single Talib. Not so surprising, considering that the people they were paid to fight are not foreign invaders -- that would be us -- but their Pashtun cousins.
Moreover, the surge into the Afghan south seems only to have further alienated the folks who live there, while increasing violence against local residents. It has also come at the expense of American troops in the east, the ones I was recently embedded with, who face an onslaught of hostile fighters moving across the border from Pakistan.
3. What about the enemy strategy? How's that working?
It seems the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and various hostile fighters in Afghanistan drew their own lessons from Petraeus's surge in Iraq: they learned to deal with a surge not by fading away before it, but by meeting it with a surge of their own. An American commander defending the eastern front told me that hostile forces recently wiped out five border posts. "They opened the gate," he said, but with the American high command focused on a future surge into Kandahar, who's paying attention? In fact, as the battle heats up in the east, another official told me, they are running short of helicopters to medevac out American casualties. In this way, so-called strategy easily morphs into a shell game played largely for an American audience at the expense of American soldiers.
And all the while America's "partner" in this strategy, the dubious President Karzai, consolidates his power, which is thoroughly grounded in the Pashtun south, the domain of his even more suspect half-brother, Ahmed Wali. In the process, he studiously ignores the parliament, which lately has been staging a silent stop-work protest, occasionally banging on the desks for emphasis. He now evidently bets his money (which used to be ours) on the failure of American forces, and extends feelers of reconciliation to Pakistan and the Taliban, the folks he now fondly calls his "angry brothers." As for the Afghan people, even the most resilient citizens of Kabul who, like Obama, remain hopeful, say: "This is our big problem." They're talking, of course, about Karzai and his government that the Americans put in place, pay for, prop up, and pretend to be "partners" with.
In fact, America's silent acceptance of President Karzai's flagrantly fraudulent election last summer -- all those stuffed ballot boxes -- seems to have exploded whatever illusions many Afghans still had about an American commitment to democracy. They know now that matters will not be resolved at polling places or in jirga council tents. They probably won't be resolved in Afghanistan at all, but in secret locations in Washington, Riyadh, Islamabad, and elsewhere. The American people, by the way, will have little more to say about the resolution of the war -- though it consumes our wealth and our soldiers, too -- than the Afghans.Think of what's happening in Afghanistan more generally as a creeping Talibanization, which Afghans say is working all too well. In Marja, in Kandahar, in the east, everywhere, the Taliban do what we can't and roll out their own (shadow) governments-in-a-box, ready to solve disputes, administer rough justice, collect taxes, and enforce "virtue." In Herat, the Ulema of the West issue a fatwa restricting the freedom of women to work and move about without a mahram, or male relative as escort. In Kabul, the police raid restaurants that serve alcohol, and the government shuts down reputable, secular international NGOs, charging them with proselytizing. Taliban influence creeps into parliament, into legislation restricting constitutional freedoms, into ministries and governmental contracts where corruption flourishes, and into the provisional peace jirga tent where delegates called for freedom for all imprisoned Taliban. Out of the jails, into the government, to sit side by side with warlords and war criminals, mujahideen brothers under the skin. Embraced by President Karzai. Perhaps even welcomed one day by American strategists and President Obama himself as a way out.
4. If it's so bad, why can't it be stopped?
The threatening gloom of American policy is never the whole story. There are young progressive men and women running for Parliament in the coming September elections. There are women organizing to keep hold of the modest gains they've made, though how they will do that when the men seem so intent on negotiating them away remains a mystery. There are the valiant efforts of thoroughly devout Muslims who wish to live in the twenty-first century. When they look outward to more developed Islamic countries, however, they see that their homeland is a Muslim country like no other -- and if the Taliban return, it will only be worse.
American development was supposed to have made it all so much better. But tales abound of small, successful projects in education or health care, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and then dropped without a single visit from USAID monitors afraid to leave their Embassy fortress in Kabul. Regularly, USAID now hands over huge hunks of "aid" money to big, impossibly ambitious, quick-fix projects run by the usual no-bid Beltway Bandit contractors whose incompetence, wastefulness, unconscionable profits, and outright fraud should be a national scandal. This, too, is a process everyone knows but can't speak about because it's not part of the official script in which the U.S. must be seen as developing backward Afghanistan, instead of sending it reeling into the darkest of ages. Despairing humanitarians recall that Hillary Clinton promised as secretary of state to clean house at USAID, which, she said, had become nothing but "a contracting shop." Well, here's a flash from Afghanistan: it's still a contracting shop, and the contracts are going to the same set of contractors who have been exposed again and again as venal, fraudulent, and criminal.
Just as Obama sends more troops and a new commander to fight a fraudulent war for a purpose that makes no sense to anyone -- except perhaps the so-called defense intellectuals who live in an alternative Washington-based Afghanaland of their own creation -- Clinton presides over a fraudulent aid program that functions chiefly to transfer American tax dollars from the national treasury to the pockets of already rich contractors and their congressional cronies. If you still believe, as I would like to, that Obama and Clinton actually meant to make change, then you have to ask: How does this state of affairs continue, and why do the members of the international community -- the U.N., all those international NGOs, and our fast-fading coalition allies -- sign off on it? You have only to look around in Kabul and elsewhere, as I did this month, to see that the more American military there is, the more insurgents there are; the more insurgent attacks, the more private security contractors; the more barriers and razor wire, the more restrictions on freedom of movement in the capital for Afghans and internationals alike; and the more security, the higher the danger pay for members of the international community who choose to stay and spend their time complaining about the way security prevents them from doing their useful work.And so it goes round and round, this ill-oiled war machine, generating ever more incentives for almost everyone involved -- except ordinary Afghans, of course -- to keep on keeping on. There's a little something for quite a few: government officials in the U.S., Afghanistan, and Pakistan, for-profit contractors, defense intellectuals, generals, spies, soldiers behind the lines, international aid workers and their Afghan employees, diplomats, members of the Afghan National Army, and the police, and the Taliban, and their various pals, and the whole array of camp followers that service warfare everywhere.
It goes round and round, this inexorable machine, this elaborate construction of corporate capitalism at war, generating immense sums of money for relatively small numbers of people, immense debt for our nation, immense sacrifice from our combat soldiers, and for ordinary Afghans and those who have befriended them or been befriended by them, moments of promise and hope, moments of clarity and rage, and moments of dark laughter that sometimes cannot forestall the onset of despair.
Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter. Her new book, War Is Not Over When It's Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on her next book about what happens when America's wars come home. To visit her website, click here.[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, co-founder of the American Empire Project, author of The End of Victory Culture, as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Haymarket Books).]
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Bribes in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
The US military and US government prove to be endless in the ways that try to recreate, justify, and implement the US-led war and occupation in Afghanistan. The following article addresses the issue of how US money ends up as bribes to Taliban fighters. Why? The Taliban are needed to protect US supply trucks. What a sheer waste of money and resources, not to mention the casualties to US and allied troops and the greater destruction and casualties suffered by Afghani civilians. This war goes on not to advance "democratic values." It goes on because US leaders believe that Afghanistan is important to their larger interests in the oil-rich Central Asia and Middle East regions. It goes on because our bloated military-industrial complex needs wars to justify its continued government support. US wars yield great harm, hatred of the US, and a distraction from, or underfunding of, many other efforts needed to confront the monumental crises confronting the US and the world.
Kucinich: ‘We may be funding our own killers in Afghanistan’
By Sahil KapurTuesday, June 8th, 2010
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0608/kucinich-war-critics-rebuke-usfunded-bribes-afghan-militants
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Click for New York Times story: US-backed 'bribes' in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies "are using American money to bribe the Taliban" to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a "series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents," the Times said.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading opponent of the war, wondered, "Is the U.S. paying for attacks on U.S. troops?”
"Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers," Kucinich said in a statement e-mailed to Raw Story, renewing his longstanding call for a pullout. "Our continued presence in Afghanistan is detrimental to our security."
"The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops," he said.
Kucinich’s motion in March to implement a swift withdrawal of US troops from the region failed by a margin of 365-65 in the House.
"In the coming weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to give another $33 billion for war efforts... I will be bringing this report to the personal attention of individual Members of Congress prior to the vote on any additional war funding," the Ohio congressman said.
The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who "believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban."
A White House spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Robert Greenwald, an ardent war critic and director of the 2009 documentary "Rethink Afghanistan," viewed the Times story as vindication for his message.
“Supporting a corrupt elite in a civil war does nothing to make us safer, costs the United States billions of dollars, and it’s not working,” Greenwald told Raw Story.
It "confirms what we have heard numerous times from our friends, co workers and producers in Afghanistan. The United States is effectively funding both sides of the war all too often," he said.
The administration and large bipartisan majorities in Congress continue to support and fund 8-year-long military operations in Afghanistan, warning that a pullout could lead to a Taliban takeover and greater threats to American interests.
Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters Monday that the US, Japan, Britain and other countries have “committed” roughly “200 million dollars” to fund peace efforts in Afghanistan, Agence-France Presse reports. The Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program aims to reintegrate Taliban fighters who have renounced violence into Afghan society.
Kucinich: ‘We may be funding our own killers in Afghanistan’
By Sahil KapurTuesday, June 8th, 2010
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0608/kucinich-war-critics-rebuke-usfunded-bribes-afghan-militants
Share
Click for New York Times story: US-backed 'bribes' in Afghanistan may be funding Taliban
On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies "are using American money to bribe the Taliban" to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a "series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents," the Times said.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a leading opponent of the war, wondered, "Is the U.S. paying for attacks on U.S. troops?”
"Our troops are dying in Afghanistan, and now it turns out we may be funding their killers," Kucinich said in a statement e-mailed to Raw Story, renewing his longstanding call for a pullout. "Our continued presence in Afghanistan is detrimental to our security."
"The American people are paying to prop up a corrupt government that may be using our money to pay private companies to drum up business by paying the insurgents to attack our troops," he said.
Kucinich’s motion in March to implement a swift withdrawal of US troops from the region failed by a margin of 365-65 in the House.
"In the coming weeks, Congress is expected to be asked to give another $33 billion for war efforts... I will be bringing this report to the personal attention of individual Members of Congress prior to the vote on any additional war funding," the Ohio congressman said.
The Times interviewed a NATO official in Kabul who "believed millions of dollars were making their way to the Taliban."
A White House spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Robert Greenwald, an ardent war critic and director of the 2009 documentary "Rethink Afghanistan," viewed the Times story as vindication for his message.
“Supporting a corrupt elite in a civil war does nothing to make us safer, costs the United States billions of dollars, and it’s not working,” Greenwald told Raw Story.
It "confirms what we have heard numerous times from our friends, co workers and producers in Afghanistan. The United States is effectively funding both sides of the war all too often," he said.
The administration and large bipartisan majorities in Congress continue to support and fund 8-year-long military operations in Afghanistan, warning that a pullout could lead to a Taliban takeover and greater threats to American interests.
Richard Holbrooke, US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters Monday that the US, Japan, Britain and other countries have “committed” roughly “200 million dollars” to fund peace efforts in Afghanistan, Agence-France Presse reports. The Afghanistan Peace and Reconciliation Program aims to reintegrate Taliban fighters who have renounced violence into Afghan society.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
UnDoc finds corruption to be widespread in Afghanistan
The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has just reported on a survey of 7,600 Afghans "in 12 provincial capitals and 1,600 villages around Afghanistan." [ See below.] The central finding of the survey is that "corruption" in government at all levels is a bigger worry than even security and unemployment, although security and unemployment are also widespread worries.
Corruption is undoubtedly related to weak and divided government and low wages for those in public jobs. The opium trade, though illegal, plays a major role in fueling corruption inside and outside of government.
It remain to be seen whether US counterinsurgincy strategies will reduce the level of corruption. The Central Karzai government lacks the legitimacy and resources to do it.
My impression is that things are so bad economically for so many Afghans that corruption and the opium trade have become two of the only ways people can earn or get money. If the US-led occupation cannot deal with these conditions, especially while the government remains crippled and largely ineffective, then corruption will continue.
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Corruption widespread in Afghanistan, UNODC survey says get payments for necessary licenes,payments for the use of roads by ordinary afghan, official paperwork of all sort.
19 January 2010
Poverty and violence are usually portrayed as the biggest challenges confronting Afghanistan. But ask the Afghans themselves, and you get a different answer: corruption is their biggest worry. A new UNODC survey reveals that an overwhelming 59 per cent of Afghans view public dishonesty as a bigger concern than insecurity (54 per cent) and unemployment (52 per cent).
Corruption in Afghanistan: Bribery as Reported by Victims is based on interviews with 7,600 people in 12 provincial capitals and more than 1,600 villages around Afghanistan. It records the real experiences (rather than just perceptions) of urban as well as rural residents, men and women, between autumn 2008 and autumn 2009.
One of the respondents in the survey explains: "My cousin runs a medical practice. Some expired and low-quality drugs were found in his clinic and the health department started a procedure to take him to court. Later, he bribed the head doctor and his file was clean within a day. My cousin is still selling the expired and poor-quality drugs made in Pakistan, under the label of Germany and US."
In 2009, Afghan citizens had to pay approximately US$ 2,490 million in bribes, which is equivalent to 23 per cent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), according to the report. By coincidence, this is similar to the revenue accrued by the opium trade in 2009 (which UNODC estimates at US$ 2.8 billion). "Drugs and bribes are the two largest income generators in Afghanistan: together they correspond to about half the country's (licit) GDP," said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa as he released the report today in London.
The report shows that graft is part of everyday life in Afghanistan. During the survey period, one Afghan out of two had to pay at least one kickback to a public official. In more than half the cases (56 per cent), the request for illicit payment was an explicit demand by the service provider. In three quarters of the cases, baksheesh (bribes) were paid in cash. The average bribe is US$ 160, in a country where GDP per capita is a mere US$ 425 per year.
Another respondent explains: "There are people known as 'employed on commission' who operate in front of government buildings. They approach us saying that they can solve any kind of issue in a short time and then they quote the price. For example, if you need a passport or driving license or are paying taxes and customs duties, they can give you the final receipt which has been processed through all official channels in a matter of days, a process which takes usually weeks. Then they will take the money and share it with those who are sitting inside offices."
According to the survey, those entrusted with upholding the law are seen as most guilty of violating it. Around 25 per cent of Afghans had to pay at least one bribe to police and local officials during the survey period. Between 10-20 per cent had to pay bribes either to judges, prosecutors or members of the government. The international community does not escape criticism: 54 per cent of Afghans believe that international organizations and NGOs "are corrupt and are in the country just to get rich". Lack of confidence in the ability of public institutions to deliver public goods and services is causing Afghans to look for alternative providers of security and welfare, including criminal and anti-government elements.
"Corruption is the biggest impediment to improving security, development and governance in Afghanistan," said the head of UNODC. "It is also enabling other forms of crime, like drug trafficking and terrorism," he warned.
In order to prevent this condition from becoming terminal, Mr. Costa called on President Karzai to "urgently administer tough medicine based on the United Nations Convention against Corruption, which he pushed so hard to ratify". This includes preventive measures, like turning the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption into "an independent, fearless and well-funded anti-corruption authority. At the moment, this is not the case". He also called for vigorous vetting of public officials; public servants to disclose their incomes and assets; and governors and local administrators "with proven records of collusion with shady characters" to be removed.
Corruption is undoubtedly related to weak and divided government and low wages for those in public jobs. The opium trade, though illegal, plays a major role in fueling corruption inside and outside of government.
It remain to be seen whether US counterinsurgincy strategies will reduce the level of corruption. The Central Karzai government lacks the legitimacy and resources to do it.
My impression is that things are so bad economically for so many Afghans that corruption and the opium trade have become two of the only ways people can earn or get money. If the US-led occupation cannot deal with these conditions, especially while the government remains crippled and largely ineffective, then corruption will continue.
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Corruption widespread in Afghanistan, UNODC survey says get payments for necessary licenes,payments for the use of roads by ordinary afghan, official paperwork of all sort.
19 January 2010
Poverty and violence are usually portrayed as the biggest challenges confronting Afghanistan. But ask the Afghans themselves, and you get a different answer: corruption is their biggest worry. A new UNODC survey reveals that an overwhelming 59 per cent of Afghans view public dishonesty as a bigger concern than insecurity (54 per cent) and unemployment (52 per cent).
Corruption in Afghanistan: Bribery as Reported by Victims is based on interviews with 7,600 people in 12 provincial capitals and more than 1,600 villages around Afghanistan. It records the real experiences (rather than just perceptions) of urban as well as rural residents, men and women, between autumn 2008 and autumn 2009.
One of the respondents in the survey explains: "My cousin runs a medical practice. Some expired and low-quality drugs were found in his clinic and the health department started a procedure to take him to court. Later, he bribed the head doctor and his file was clean within a day. My cousin is still selling the expired and poor-quality drugs made in Pakistan, under the label of Germany and US."
In 2009, Afghan citizens had to pay approximately US$ 2,490 million in bribes, which is equivalent to 23 per cent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP), according to the report. By coincidence, this is similar to the revenue accrued by the opium trade in 2009 (which UNODC estimates at US$ 2.8 billion). "Drugs and bribes are the two largest income generators in Afghanistan: together they correspond to about half the country's (licit) GDP," said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa as he released the report today in London.
The report shows that graft is part of everyday life in Afghanistan. During the survey period, one Afghan out of two had to pay at least one kickback to a public official. In more than half the cases (56 per cent), the request for illicit payment was an explicit demand by the service provider. In three quarters of the cases, baksheesh (bribes) were paid in cash. The average bribe is US$ 160, in a country where GDP per capita is a mere US$ 425 per year.
Another respondent explains: "There are people known as 'employed on commission' who operate in front of government buildings. They approach us saying that they can solve any kind of issue in a short time and then they quote the price. For example, if you need a passport or driving license or are paying taxes and customs duties, they can give you the final receipt which has been processed through all official channels in a matter of days, a process which takes usually weeks. Then they will take the money and share it with those who are sitting inside offices."
According to the survey, those entrusted with upholding the law are seen as most guilty of violating it. Around 25 per cent of Afghans had to pay at least one bribe to police and local officials during the survey period. Between 10-20 per cent had to pay bribes either to judges, prosecutors or members of the government. The international community does not escape criticism: 54 per cent of Afghans believe that international organizations and NGOs "are corrupt and are in the country just to get rich". Lack of confidence in the ability of public institutions to deliver public goods and services is causing Afghans to look for alternative providers of security and welfare, including criminal and anti-government elements.
"Corruption is the biggest impediment to improving security, development and governance in Afghanistan," said the head of UNODC. "It is also enabling other forms of crime, like drug trafficking and terrorism," he warned.
In order to prevent this condition from becoming terminal, Mr. Costa called on President Karzai to "urgently administer tough medicine based on the United Nations Convention against Corruption, which he pushed so hard to ratify". This includes preventive measures, like turning the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption into "an independent, fearless and well-funded anti-corruption authority. At the moment, this is not the case". He also called for vigorous vetting of public officials; public servants to disclose their incomes and assets; and governors and local administrators "with proven records of collusion with shady characters" to be removed.
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