Tragedistan

One of Ahmed Rashid's gifts as a writer is his way of capturing moments of heartbreaking absurdity. In the June 22 issue of the New York Review of Books, his reportage on Afghanistan does just that. He writes:

In 2005, sitting on a sofa in the hotel's lobby, I found on my left a former Taliban commander with a beard down to his waist, and on my right a young and beautiful Afghan woman from Herat, whose only concession to "covering up" was a very loose and flimsy head scarf. They were both members of the new Afghan parliament that had been elected on September 18; for the past week they had been receiving instruction from UN experts on what a parliament was and how to behave in one. The two-hour lunch breaks allowed the members of parliament (MPs) to meet each other informally. As he argued with the woman, I could see that the former Taliban officer was still in a state of shock that she was there at all.

Sadly, as Rashid reports, that is about as good as it got for Afghanistan. And there is one reason, four letters actually, why Afghanistan is, as he puts it, "near collapse." Iraq.

Washington's refusal to take state-building in Afghanistan seriously and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq. For Afghanistan the results have been too few Western troops, too little money, and a lack of coherent strategy and sustained policy initiatives on the part of Western and Afghan leaders.

Unlike Iraq, however, most Afghans, Taliban excepted, want America and NATO to stay. So why is it we are lowering our profile in Afghanistan? Again Rashid:

The American government has demanded that NATO become more active, because, I was told, the beleaguered Donald Rumsfeld is desperate to bring some American troops home by November's congressional elections. Around three thousand of the 23,000 US troops now deployed in Afghanistan are scheduled to return home this summer and Western intelligence officials say several thousand more may depart before November.

We cut and run in Afghanistan, handing off the operation to our allies right at the moment when a resurgent Taliban makes gains across most of the south of the country and on ocassion blows stuff up in the capitol, Kabul, just to prove they can. Seems like sound strategery to me!

Of course, much of what is happening in Afghanistan was predicted before Iraq was invaded. Experts claimed that a war in Iraq would have regional repurcussions, that it would be an excellent recruiting tool and an even better training ground for wannabe jihadis. Rumsfeld (and the witless neocon bloggers who idolize him) dismissed any suggestion of the sort out of hand. Rumsfeld was wrong and innocent Afghans, NATO troops and Americans are paying for his mistakes. As Rashid chronicles:

Taliban logistics, training, and recruitment were formerly dependent on allies in Pakistan such as the fundamentalist Islamic parties that rule Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province. But the Taliban is now well entrenched in southern Afghanistan too. Al-Qaeda has also put Taliban members in touch with insurgents in Iraq; the result is that the Taliban members are learning how to plan and carry out suicide bombings, make and plant mines, and detonate improvised explosive devices (IEDs). They thus have been able to prepare increasingly deadly ambushes for Afghan and Western troops.

Like so many other critical elements in our struggle with al Qaeda, fact triumphs over fantasy; and desire did not indeed make it reality, no matter how hard the folks at Pajamaline stared at their Magic 8-balls. Dear me, how untidy reality really is . . .

And as local resistance increases, so too does international pressure. Russia, Pakistan, Iran, all of the Central Asian Republics, none of them want us there, as Barnett Rubin, the expert of experts on Afghanistan writes. They all oppose a "long-term US presence and have funds for their own Afghan proxies just as they did during the civil war in the 1990s." Rashid further intones, ominously, "[that] they are waiting for the Americans to leave." Patiently, no doubt.

It won't be long before the exigencies of the next presidential or Congressional campaign season sees to it. Meanwhile, the promised reconstruction of the country by the global community, whose true long term interests lie with a stable Afghanistan, has not appeared. The grim results of this failure are shameful:

That international donors refuse to invest in the agricultural regions where 70 percent of the population live has been a critical failure (opium anyone? ~spk). Another has been the failure to fund infrastructure projects. In the five years since the US-led invasion not a single new dam, power station, or major water system has been built. Only one major intercity highway has been completed. Only one in three Kabul residents has electricity, which works only one out of every three nights. Rubin points out that until 2003 funding for Afghanistan's reconstruction was below that of East Timor and Haiti. Meanwhile, the US and NATO are spending between $15 billion and $18 billion a year on their military operations. Most tragic of all, Western populations are hardly aware of the crisis because there has been chronic failure to report on Afghanistan, especially in the US.

Why has there been a "chronic failure" to report on Afghanistan, as Rashid says? Well, my guess would be that white women abducted in the Caribbean, or multi-million dollar contracts for talking head 'journalists' like Bill O'Reilly take precedence over serious reporting. Add in cost cutting measures overseas (to pay for O'Reilly and his ilk) and the picture would be complete. Rashid, however, recounts something far worse:

Recently I asked a friend who is a senior reporter with CNN why CNN has not had a staff reporter in Kabul or Islamabad for over a year. . .

. . . He told me that the problem in these Muslim capitals is not one of cost, but that very few senior staff members are volunteering to be stationed there. Nor are young American men and women, who a few years ago would be volunteering to report from Asia and the Middle East, coming forward. In contrast, in Britain, dozens of young journalists have been applying to report from both regions, whenever jobs come open. "Americans, especially young Americans, do not want to travel to Asia or the Islamic world, anywhere there may be danger," my CNN friend said. "It's a sad time for American journalism."

So there you have it: the lures of celebrity journalism, of the DC cocktail circuit and a whiff of alleged cowardice has replaced the need to inform. Amidst it all, stories like this one go untold:

In Afghanistan the biggest USAID contractor for education is Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C.–based consulting company that has close connections to both the Pentagon and the State Department. In 2003 it received a $60 million contract from USAID to develop primary education in Afghanistan. The Washington Post, in recent reports, has described the failure of this project. Primary schools built at a cost of $174,000 each could have been built by Afghan contractors for $20,000 or less.

Magnify this by ten in Iraq and you have the scope of corruption and rot that is swiftly congealing into a national catastrophe.

"So, what happened in the Caribbean again? Can I have a beer with that, too--the one with the pretty horses in the add, please?" Is what we will hear at the next focus group, not, "I'd like to learn more about East Timor.

So, CNN or MSNBC, here's the deal: I handled on the job live radio training pretty darn well, so send me to Afghanistan. I'll go, as long as I get to report the truth.