Looking for an SOB

PART II OF THE CONTINUING SAGA


There seems to be no end to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai's willingness to poke a stick in the eye of those who are his chief military props--the United States and its NATO allies.

An earlier blog "Looking for a Son of a Bitch" (July 29) said the United States is looking for an SOB (or plural) who will help us to extricate ourselves from an increasingly unpopular war both in that country and this. Ideally, the search for such will lead to a person or group(s) who will be "our son of a bitch" as President Franklin Roosevelt once described our relationship with one time Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. By now the Obama administration must surely have concluded that Karzai is indeed an SOB, but unfortunately not "ours".

For some time we have had sharp disagreements with Karzai over political, military, and corruption issues. But within the last two weeks or so he has gone out of his way to further aggravate an already strained relationship.

First, in early August he further enhanced his reputation for tolerating gross corruption within his government by directly interfering with American attempts to track down what has happened to large sums of U.S. aid to that country. A top aide to Karzai was arrested on bribery charges by a U.S.-financed Afghan anti-corruption unit, but was released later the same day by, according to reports, persons inside the Karzai palace. More recently Karzai told visiting Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the anti-corruption units would not be interfered with, but we shall see how that works out.

Next, in mid-August Karzai said he was halting the activities of all private security firms operating in Afghanistan. Private security firms, such as Blackwater in Iraq, have certainly cast doubt on our reliance on private contractors to carry out what normally should be done by our military and/or intelligence services. But apparently without any prior consultation with the United States, Karzai set a year-end deadline for ending all contractor services, well before Afghan security forces are prepared to take over the duty of protecting a wide array of foreign firms and diplomatic missions.

It seems apparent, however, that we are stuck with the SOB. We have been making efforts to attract other sob's (lower case) as allies by putting them on the payroll and/or arming them to help pacify the countryside. For example, in late July the Washington Post reported that we had recruited Haji Ghani who was described as a "hashish-growing former warlord" with a semiofficial police force "who is known to show his anger through beatings." Thus, we hired a local strongman to clean up his neighborhood. This is similar to the approach we used in Iraq on a larger scale. There we funded and armed the Awakening Movement made up of Sunnis (the sectarian power base of former dictator Saddam Hussein) who had initially allied themselves with or were friendly toward al-Qaida terrorists, particularly in Anbar province. We bought them out. The problem in Iraq now is that a large part of the Awakening forces is being shunted aside by the Shiite controlled government which fears the Movement will become an independent armed force opposing the government; a smaller part may be absorbed into the Baghdad- controlled security service or military.

In Afghanistan, however, recruiting or contracting lower case sob's to help pacify hostile neighborhoods may end up as repeating what we did to get the Russians out of the country. That is, we armed a variety of warlords/tribal groups to battle the Russians. When the Russians gave up and left, the warlords fought among themselves with the Taliban emerging as the last man standing. We may be in the process of repeating the same mistakes when we recruit local warlords and militias to help us in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida. This dilemma was pointed out in a recent staff report of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. The report concerned the problem of protection payments to local warlords to safeguard the transportation of U.S. military supplies. Much of the transportation work is done through a private contractor who in turn has to pay local warlords to secure safe passage for the convoys going through their territory. The payments are a form of "extortion and corruption" and it is even possible that some of the money finds its way to the Taliban for another layer of protection payments, according to the report.

What it seems to come down to is that Afghanistan is a country populated by a lot of upper and lower case SOB's/sob's, but none of them can really be called "ours". More likely they are short term rentals. As we tunnel our way out of Afghanistan the final victors may be the rural warlords (who have historically been the country's power base), Karzai the Kabul warlord, and the Taliban. In the end, whenever that may be, collectively they will be looking at the United States as they looked earlier at the Russians, as another upper case SOB they finally got rid of.