Despite years of urging and oversight by American advisers, Mr. Karzai’s government has yet to prosecute a high-level corruption case. And now many American officials say that they have little expectation that Mr. Farnood’s case will prove to be the exception — or that Washington will try to do much about it…
As Americans pull back from Afghanistan, Mr. Farnood’s case exemplifies how the United States is leaving behind a problem it underwrote over the past decade with tens of billions of dollars of aid and logistical support: a narrow business and political elite defined by its corruption, and despised by most Afghans for it.
Mitt Romney’s web site:
[Mitt Romney] will review our transition to the Afghan military by holding discussions with our commanders in the field. He will order a full interagency assessment of our military and assistance presence in Afghanistan to determine the level required to secure our gains and to train Afghan forces to the point where they can protect the sovereignty of Afghanistan from the tyranny of the Taliban. Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan under a Romney administration will be based on conditions on the ground as assessed by our military commanders.
To defeat the insurgency in Afghanistan, the United States will need the cooperation of both the Afghan and Pakistani governments.
Mr. Romney suffers from the misimpression that the principal problem with our Afghan strategy has been lack of listening to military leaders. In fact, it has been long clear that the Afghan government is structurally corrupt, cannot become otherwise, and no amount of “listening” to military leaders or making “interagency assessments” is going to make that government uncorrupt. The Times:
Still, the Obama administration has concluded that pressing the fight against corruption, as many American officials tried to do in recent years, could further alienate Mr. Karzai and others around him whom Washington is relying on as it tries to manage a graceful drawdown.
The article even points out a case in which Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster provided evidence to Pres. Karzai that Gen. Ahmad Zia Yaftali had stolen tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs (!) from the country’s main military hospital (!) and still no prosecution.
In many ways Afghanistan more closely resembles Vietnam since we are employing a very similar strategy (hold and deploy and ‘Afghanification’ as opposed to ‘Vietnamization’) to that wars closing stages. In much the same manner, our efforts to create a loyal liberal democratic state are impeded by a corrupt government. Much as Diem and his brothers were corrupt and remote from their people so is Karzai and his brothers, and the Taliban like the Vietcong has gone from an obscure ideologically driven force to a catch all military opposition to a corrupt government. Its strength will only multiply the longer we back Karzai and the longer we stay. Make no mistake, a President Obama will wind this conflict to a close and delivered substantial strategic victories (dismantling of AQ infrastructure and the killing of OBL) that alluded Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam. We can leave this nation with our credibility intact and our policymakers should wake up to this reality.