WNU Editor: My Commentary For What Will Be The Most Important Story For 2009

The mansions of Afghan officials in the Sherpur neighborhood of Kabul are a curiosity not only for their size, but also because government salaries are not very big. Danfung Dennis for The New York Times

For Afghans, A Price For Everything, And Anything
For A Price -- The New York Times

KABUL, Afghanistan — When it comes to governing this violent, fractious land, everything, it seems, has its price.

Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000.

Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban.

Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

“It is very shameful, but probably I will pay the bribe,” Mohammed Naim, a young English teacher, said as he stood in front of the Secondary Courthouse in Kabul. His brother had been arrested a week before, and the police were demanding $4,000 for his release. “Everything is possible in this country now. Everything.”

Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.

Read more ....

My Comment: This is probably just the tip of the iceberg. In my business dealings with companies and government corporations throughout Asia .... the problem of corruption has always been in the forefront for any deal to be consummated (and this was twenty years ago) .... the problems and corruption are many times worse today.

I escaped being snared into this web by primarily dealing with only senior officials on the federal level (in China), or with family contacts in Korea and Japan. (WNU Editor: I am a white Canadian whose nationality is Russian who has grown up in French Quebec but who was adopted as family by a number of Korean and Japanese families .... it sounds complicated and it is .... but that is another story at another time).

In Afghanistan .... this problem of corruption has only gotten worse .... and it now permeates every level from the Municipal, to the Provincial .... and now the Federal level. The U.S. can send 500,000 soldiers into the country and spend a trillion dollars, but this corruption would undermine everything that they would be able to do .... lets face it, the Afghan culture will not change.

Is the mission doomed in Afghanistan, I will have to say yes.

My reasons for saying this is that I am looking at this conflict from a perspective that is different from what Nato military commanders and their political masters are looking at. They look at it from a military stand point .... an insurgency that needs to be won. I do not see it this way. I have never served in the military and I do not have a clue to what is involved in counter insurgency. I have still read thousands of books, tens of thousands of articles, and have discussed military issues with men who have served .... but a military man I am not.

My specialty is politics, history, and the importance that culture has in shaping the battlefield before weapons, intelligence, and the soldiers and officers become involved in fighting the battle. Nope .... what I know is how politics, economics, corruption, and a society's culture can impact a successful war with minimum casualties, or produce a long drawn out affair with heavy casualties that will not resolve the situation.

Afghanistan .... like Vietnam and the previous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan .... is rapidly becoming a failed state with all the worse that war can produce. Tonight .... while Afghan bureaucrats and politicians build mansions for themselves .... there are millions of hungry Afghan refugees living in tents who are hungry. The Taliban may be splintered into hundreds of gangs with very little central control .... but Al Qaeda is unified and they have the will to win. This will to win is what has unified the Taliban this year, and I predict that in 2009 is when they will start to strangle the the small villages and towns in the country. In 2010 is when they will start to enter the cities.

Afghans are losing the will to fight for their country, and it is easy to understand why. How can they fight for a cause when their leaders are inept and corrupt .... and the enemy is perceived to be not only just and righteous but who are also fighting with God on their side. If I was an Afghan soldier or policeman.... I would not fight for this culture of corruption.

If I was an American soldier .... I will be wondering what I am doing in a mission when the only thing that I am protecting is an Afghan government that treats its civilians harshly with no sense of justice or moral standing. This is something that will be very difficult to reconcile. The American soldier (for the most part) perceives himself as a just and moral person who is fighting the right and moral battle. His will to fight for immorality and injustice will sap away with each passing month.

Is President Obama the right man to lead our nation to victory in Afghanistan. The answer is equally no for the simple reason that he represents to many on what is so wrong in American political culture today. Chicago politics and its political culture is terribly corrupt .... and a man who rose from that culture cannot possibly work to then undermine it. Afghan political and social culture is also equally corrupt .... but unlike the situation in Chicago, Afghanistan has a determined group of men who have the will to fight using violence as a means to get rid of this culture. And this is the problem.

Like President Johnson and the Vietnam war .... President Obama is going to be sucked into a regional conflict that the U.S. cannot possibly win .... even if they kill 1 million Afghans and spend hundreds of billions of dollars.

Intentions will be good .... they always are. But the failure to act in eliminating the ingredients that makes Afghanistan a failed state will create the storm that will doom his Presidency, and severely damage the U.S. military and their moral stature.

This war is already lost. The surge is not going to be effective. A few thousand U.S. Servicemen and 100,000 Afghans are going to lose their lives in the next two years .... and for what?