Rife Corruption Allows Rag-Tag Taliban To Win

Taliban Prisoners

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

Australia has lost a sixth soldier in Afghanistan, adding to the human and material cost of its involvement in the country. This comes hot on the heels of a huge suicide bombing that blasted the Indian embassy in Kabul on Monday, resulting in an appalling loss of many innocent lives.

All this shows that after nearly seven years of costly efforts to stabilise and rebuild Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai's Government and its international supporters have not been able to secure either the Afghan capital or many other parts of the country, particularly in the south and east along the border with Pakistan. The Afghan authorities have again pointed a finger at the Taliban and their Pakistani backers as the culprits. There is no question that these forces, which are also opposed to India's involvement in Afghanistan, bear much of responsibility for Afghanistan's woes, but this tells only part of the story.

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My Comment: This was the number one complaint from Soviet generals and leaders during their occupation of Afghanistan. They could never trust their Afghan counterparts .... and as time passed by they stopped trusting them completely.

Nato and U.S. forces operate under a different set of rules of engagement, but they are still battling a culture of corruption, intimidation, and a mindset that believes they have the right to not only take what they can from foreigners, but to also be intolerant of them when they are not.

I have mentioned many times in previous posts that to be successful in Afghanistan, we must adopt a long term strategy that must be measured in decades. After stabilizing the security situation (at least to a minimum), the next step will be reconstruction into pacified areas and an increase in education and educational resources for the young.

All parents (even for a number of the Taliban) want the best for their children. Education, reading and writing, math and the sciences ..... this in the long run will change the culture and take away the moral authority of the Taliban. If we do this, we will then have more positive outcomes like the following.