Afghanistan: The Chinese Water Torture

DOONESBURY: RED RASCAL, AFGHAN SUPER HERO

The Sunday Doonesbury comic strip is like a gift that keeps on giving. In the September 5 strip Garry Trudeau gave us the funny but all-too-true story about what a mess we get into when we hire local militias in an effort to buy some kind of peace in the neighborhood. It was an "ain't that the truth" kind of story. It was the inspiration for my September 6 post. This week (September 12) Doonesbury was a tale of Red Rascal, a mysterious Afghan super hero out to right the wrongs committed by Taliban "evil doers". It's an "ah, if that it were only so" kind of story. This post is not to reveal the true identity of Trudeau's super hero (it is not General Petraeus) but, sadly, the opposite reality -- how Afghanistan has come to be like Chinese water torture, a slow drop at a time on the forehead until you cry out for mercy or go insane.

In previous posts on Afghanistan, July 29 and August 21, I have focused on the corruption that infests the highest levels of the government of President Hamid Karzai, including his family, referring to them as upper case SOB's. (For the truly innocent among us, SOB means Son of a Bitch.) And in our search for anyone or any groups who will help us to extricate ourselves from the Afghan mess, we have paid out bribe money to lower case sob's, local warlords/militias to keep them from attacking our troops or supply convoys moving through their territories.

From the beginning, part of our Afghan policy has been to root out corruption as one of the things that needed to be done in our nation-building goal. As part of nation-building we naively believed we could get Afghan farmers to give up poppy growing and opium production, a major prop of official and unofficial corruption in the country. We have now given up nation building as a policy objective, but any effort to root out corruption has become a kind of Catch 22. The Washington Post last week (September 10) had a really scarey story which said, "After nearly nine years of nation-building in Afghanistan, experts say, the U.S. government faces mounting evidence that it has helped assemble one of the most corrupt governments in the world." Just one day before that, another Post story said that Karzai intends to block any international investigations into corruption. And prior to that Karzai blocked an American funded investigation of corruption, placing himself personally between the investigators and one of his top aides being investigated. In sum, we seem to have accepted the obvious fact that the Karzai government is corrupt beyond redemption, so if the primary goal in Afghanistan is to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban, then we will have to live with the corruption and keep funding it.

But the unceasing dripping on the forehead stemming from our growing tolerance and funding of graft may be matched by the dripping from the the fight-the-Taliban front. An important part of our current strategy to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban seems to be to subdivide the Taliban into two groups--the hard core bad guys, and the not-so-hard core moderates. The Taliban hunted by Trudeau's Red Rascal defines the former, the "evil doers". The latter apparently are those Taliban who have never signed on to what national security advisor General James Jones refers to as the "global jihad business and doesn't seem to have any ambitions beyond the region." So these lower case, moderate Taliban sob's are the ones the Afghan, Pakistani, and U.S. governments would like to bring to the bargaining table for a political solution to the war.

But that apparently isn't the only way we are seeking to use lower level Taliban and other lower case sob's, local warlords and militias. Again a Washington Post story (September 4) quoting an unidentified senior defense official: "There are areas where you need strong leadership, and some of these leaders are not entirely pure. But they can help us to be more effective in going after the primary threat, which is the Taliban." However, as already noted, the Taliban now is a divisible term and the U.S. and some international partners have committed $250 million toward an effort to get lower level Taliban to leave the insurgency and work as hired hands to provide internal security in various parts of the country. But (in Afghanistan there always seems to be a "but" or series of "buts"), there are internal divisions within the Afghan government that have prevented getting the Taliban-for-hire program from being effectively implemented. An important part of that split is one view that buying the Taliban into the fold at any level will be an opening for renewed Taliban control by the "evil doers" in the future.


So with what seems to be a continuous stream of bad news about rampant corruption funded, at least in part, with American money and with our growing frustrations in dealing with Karzai, it is hardly any wonder that there is a large and growing segment of Americans who believe that the only solution is to just get out of Afghanistan. This would help end these frustrations as well as the larger problems of growing combat casualties and spending billions of dollars to pay for the war and the corruption. In short, Afghanistan has become not only a military, political, and budgetary burden, but also a growing embarrassment. Sadly, there is no Red Rascal in sight, only the unending Chinese water torture attached to dealing with the Karzai government while
trying to fight an increasingly unpopular war.