pakistani342
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Long but written in excellent prose, a sobering read -- but the doctor's task is to deliver an accurate prognosis.
Article, here, by the influential Ann Jones on Tom's dispatch has been carried by other major publications.
A few notes:
1. Karzai's angry brothers [the Taliban] are still angry
2. Afghanistan is now a containment operation from a Western perspective
3. The NUG ... I think the article says it best
...
Worried, I wrote to Mahbouba Seraj, an old friend in Kabul, with whom I had worked for many years, to ask how she was. She replied at once:
“I believe you were reading my mind, feeling my desperation. The situation here is going from bad to worse. No one knows how a group of 500 men can enter a province that is protected with a full military garrison -- top generals in command of more than 7,000 police and army troops -- and do what they did in Kunduz. They burned, looted, raped, and killed people, and there was no one to put a stop to it. This attack, which nobody saw coming, is yet another mystery of mismanagement, miscommunication, or something much bigger and more sinister than that.”
...
Yet they chose to stay on for 15 days, long enough to terrify and murder enough citizens to make an indelible impression. Afghans of a certain age remembered in vivid flashbacks what they endured under Taliban rule before the American invasion of 2001. They could see for themselves that the men former President Hamid Karzai referred to as his “angry brothers” are still angry, and in all the long years they have waited for the inevitable departure of the Americans, they have not grown more tolerant. One woman who narrowly escaped from Kunduz summed it up simply: “They haven’t changed one bit.”
...
A few days later, my friend Mahbouba wrote me again. "For now," she said, "the light at the end of the tunnel is President Obama’s speech supporting Afghans and his decision to keep troops in Afghanistan."
Like so many Afghans, one day she’s desperate, the next she finds a glimmer of light in the gloom. That schizoid zigzag has become a way of life for embattled Afghans like her in this peculiar period “after” America’s war that couldn’t be won and will not end. In this darkening time, they face the growing strength of the Taliban, the intrusion of followers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the emergence of new splinter groups of Afghan ISIS supporters, and even the resurgence of “remnants of Al Qaeda.” Yes, the very same bunch that President Obama assured us in 2013 could “never again establish a safe haven” in Afghanistan.
...
... ... Factor in U.S. military “accounting errors” and plenty of “ghost” personnel, and the actual size of the Afghan force is anybody’s guess. In addition, that force, under pressure since last spring from a fierce, unrelenting Taliban offensive, has been losing an “unsustainable” average of 330 killed and wounded a week (andhemorrhaging a disastrous 4,000 deserters a month). ...
...
Nothing stays steady in Afghanistan. Even promising developments have a way of turning dark. Yet my friend Mahbouba, tossed between hope and despair, always tries to take in the big picture, even as it shifts its shape before her eyes. A member of the Afghan royal family, she was imprisoned in 1978 as a young university graduate, together with her family, by Soviet-inspired Afghan communists who helped to overthrow the country's first president. Eventually released, she and her family fled to the United States just before the Soviet army invaded in 1979. She became an American citizen, devoted to American-style democracy as she found it at that time.
After American bombs brought down the Taliban government in 2001, she returned to Kabul to work with civil society and international aid organizations for democracy and for women. She coached female members of parliament. She headed the Afghan Women’s Network. She ran forparliament herself and failed to be elected only because, in the Afghan version of democracy, autocracy often intervenes. In her case, election officials “mistakenly” did not deliver the ballots that would have allowed her constituents to vote.
Such was the new Afghan “democracy” run by Washington’s handpicked warlords. (Lesson still not learned: It’s a mistake to think that America’s old combat cronies in its distant wars will behave in high office like George Washington.) In this surreal context, where nothing is quite what it is said to be, Mahbouba has worked through the long, long years of war and setbacks of every sort.
Now she writes of the catastrophic taking of Kunduz, “It has already become just another bureaucratic problem: yet another indicator of something or other slightly amiss. The government again has put in place a ‘fact-finding committee’ with two men in charge, one representing the president [Ashraf Ghani], and the other the country’s Chief Executive Officer [Abdullah Abdullah].” Such bureaucratic duplication is the result of what Mahbouba calls “the two-headed legacy: this divided government with its disparate policies coming to nothing, crippling the country.” That contentious, unequal power-sharing deal was cobbled together just a year ago when Secretary of State John Kerry resolved a bitter presidential campaign between the two men by inventing a new entity, “the National Unity Government,” unknown in the Afghan constitution.
...
Of that prospect, Mahbouba writes: "The West lost Afghanistan and they know it. Right now, what is happening is a policy of containment, an effort to keep all the problems, failures, crises, and internal fighting within the borders of this country because the world cannot afford to have them spill out."
“Take the panic building right now in Uzbekistan, for example, a country that has no army of its own and is very anxious, perhaps afraid, because of what is happening right across its border with Afghanistan. Everyone knows which one of the world’s egomaniacal Strongmen may decide to ‘help’ and ‘protect’ the Uzbeks.”
...
At the moment, as Mahbouba reports from Kabul, “There is a heavy cloud of mistrust and doubt hanging over this country. No one believes anyone anymore. Rumors and conspiracy theories are flying everywhere, joined by a fear of the future and the unknown. Young Afghan men, mostly educated, full of energy and ambition, are leaving the country in droves every day. There is no work for them here. No future. The poorer ones don’t find the makings of a single meal to feed their families.”
Afghan boys and men have long gone to Pakistan or Iran in search of work, but now they set out on a trek thousands of miles long with Europe as their ultimate goal, joining untold numbers of Syrians and Iraqis in a desperate migration the likes of which we have not seen before. Last year, 58,500 Afghans successfully sought asylum in Europe. In the first seven months of this year, 77,700 made their way to Turkey or Europe and applied for asylum. By October, the number had risen to a staggering 120,000. Today, tens of thousands more risk their lives to leave the land that Washington “built.”
As yet another generation of potential Afghan leaders flees the once lovely city (the third brain-draining mass migration since the 1980s), ...
...
The two-headed government seems unconcerned. In fact, Afghans now claim that it has completely set aside its pre-election promises to fight the country’s rampant corruption. People joke that President Ghani, who once co-wrote a book called Fixing Failed States, should get to work on his memoir, to be titled, so the quipsters say, Failed Government. Afghans who once viewed former president Hamid Karzai as no more than “the mayor of Kabul,” playing second fiddle to U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, now fear that President Ghani stands in a similar relation to the commander of American and coalition forces, U.S. Army General John Campbell.
They say, too, that Ghani has gathered around him a group of men who work for their own ends and give no thought to their country. That, of course, is nothing new in Afghan political life, but after the great hope the new government engendered only one year ago, the letdown feels like a plunge into some abyss. It’s clear that where self-interest and corruption flourish, righteous and angry men will rise up. As every Afghan knows, that’s how the Taliban first got its start.
Article, here, by the influential Ann Jones on Tom's dispatch has been carried by other major publications.
A few notes:
1. Karzai's angry brothers [the Taliban] are still angry
2. Afghanistan is now a containment operation from a Western perspective
3. The NUG ... I think the article says it best
...
Worried, I wrote to Mahbouba Seraj, an old friend in Kabul, with whom I had worked for many years, to ask how she was. She replied at once:
“I believe you were reading my mind, feeling my desperation. The situation here is going from bad to worse. No one knows how a group of 500 men can enter a province that is protected with a full military garrison -- top generals in command of more than 7,000 police and army troops -- and do what they did in Kunduz. They burned, looted, raped, and killed people, and there was no one to put a stop to it. This attack, which nobody saw coming, is yet another mystery of mismanagement, miscommunication, or something much bigger and more sinister than that.”
...
Yet they chose to stay on for 15 days, long enough to terrify and murder enough citizens to make an indelible impression. Afghans of a certain age remembered in vivid flashbacks what they endured under Taliban rule before the American invasion of 2001. They could see for themselves that the men former President Hamid Karzai referred to as his “angry brothers” are still angry, and in all the long years they have waited for the inevitable departure of the Americans, they have not grown more tolerant. One woman who narrowly escaped from Kunduz summed it up simply: “They haven’t changed one bit.”
...
A few days later, my friend Mahbouba wrote me again. "For now," she said, "the light at the end of the tunnel is President Obama’s speech supporting Afghans and his decision to keep troops in Afghanistan."
Like so many Afghans, one day she’s desperate, the next she finds a glimmer of light in the gloom. That schizoid zigzag has become a way of life for embattled Afghans like her in this peculiar period “after” America’s war that couldn’t be won and will not end. In this darkening time, they face the growing strength of the Taliban, the intrusion of followers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the emergence of new splinter groups of Afghan ISIS supporters, and even the resurgence of “remnants of Al Qaeda.” Yes, the very same bunch that President Obama assured us in 2013 could “never again establish a safe haven” in Afghanistan.
...
... ... Factor in U.S. military “accounting errors” and plenty of “ghost” personnel, and the actual size of the Afghan force is anybody’s guess. In addition, that force, under pressure since last spring from a fierce, unrelenting Taliban offensive, has been losing an “unsustainable” average of 330 killed and wounded a week (andhemorrhaging a disastrous 4,000 deserters a month). ...
...
Nothing stays steady in Afghanistan. Even promising developments have a way of turning dark. Yet my friend Mahbouba, tossed between hope and despair, always tries to take in the big picture, even as it shifts its shape before her eyes. A member of the Afghan royal family, she was imprisoned in 1978 as a young university graduate, together with her family, by Soviet-inspired Afghan communists who helped to overthrow the country's first president. Eventually released, she and her family fled to the United States just before the Soviet army invaded in 1979. She became an American citizen, devoted to American-style democracy as she found it at that time.
After American bombs brought down the Taliban government in 2001, she returned to Kabul to work with civil society and international aid organizations for democracy and for women. She coached female members of parliament. She headed the Afghan Women’s Network. She ran forparliament herself and failed to be elected only because, in the Afghan version of democracy, autocracy often intervenes. In her case, election officials “mistakenly” did not deliver the ballots that would have allowed her constituents to vote.
Such was the new Afghan “democracy” run by Washington’s handpicked warlords. (Lesson still not learned: It’s a mistake to think that America’s old combat cronies in its distant wars will behave in high office like George Washington.) In this surreal context, where nothing is quite what it is said to be, Mahbouba has worked through the long, long years of war and setbacks of every sort.
Now she writes of the catastrophic taking of Kunduz, “It has already become just another bureaucratic problem: yet another indicator of something or other slightly amiss. The government again has put in place a ‘fact-finding committee’ with two men in charge, one representing the president [Ashraf Ghani], and the other the country’s Chief Executive Officer [Abdullah Abdullah].” Such bureaucratic duplication is the result of what Mahbouba calls “the two-headed legacy: this divided government with its disparate policies coming to nothing, crippling the country.” That contentious, unequal power-sharing deal was cobbled together just a year ago when Secretary of State John Kerry resolved a bitter presidential campaign between the two men by inventing a new entity, “the National Unity Government,” unknown in the Afghan constitution.
...
Of that prospect, Mahbouba writes: "The West lost Afghanistan and they know it. Right now, what is happening is a policy of containment, an effort to keep all the problems, failures, crises, and internal fighting within the borders of this country because the world cannot afford to have them spill out."
“Take the panic building right now in Uzbekistan, for example, a country that has no army of its own and is very anxious, perhaps afraid, because of what is happening right across its border with Afghanistan. Everyone knows which one of the world’s egomaniacal Strongmen may decide to ‘help’ and ‘protect’ the Uzbeks.”
...
At the moment, as Mahbouba reports from Kabul, “There is a heavy cloud of mistrust and doubt hanging over this country. No one believes anyone anymore. Rumors and conspiracy theories are flying everywhere, joined by a fear of the future and the unknown. Young Afghan men, mostly educated, full of energy and ambition, are leaving the country in droves every day. There is no work for them here. No future. The poorer ones don’t find the makings of a single meal to feed their families.”
Afghan boys and men have long gone to Pakistan or Iran in search of work, but now they set out on a trek thousands of miles long with Europe as their ultimate goal, joining untold numbers of Syrians and Iraqis in a desperate migration the likes of which we have not seen before. Last year, 58,500 Afghans successfully sought asylum in Europe. In the first seven months of this year, 77,700 made their way to Turkey or Europe and applied for asylum. By October, the number had risen to a staggering 120,000. Today, tens of thousands more risk their lives to leave the land that Washington “built.”
As yet another generation of potential Afghan leaders flees the once lovely city (the third brain-draining mass migration since the 1980s), ...
...
The two-headed government seems unconcerned. In fact, Afghans now claim that it has completely set aside its pre-election promises to fight the country’s rampant corruption. People joke that President Ghani, who once co-wrote a book called Fixing Failed States, should get to work on his memoir, to be titled, so the quipsters say, Failed Government. Afghans who once viewed former president Hamid Karzai as no more than “the mayor of Kabul,” playing second fiddle to U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, now fear that President Ghani stands in a similar relation to the commander of American and coalition forces, U.S. Army General John Campbell.
They say, too, that Ghani has gathered around him a group of men who work for their own ends and give no thought to their country. That, of course, is nothing new in Afghan political life, but after the great hope the new government engendered only one year ago, the letdown feels like a plunge into some abyss. It’s clear that where self-interest and corruption flourish, righteous and angry men will rise up. As every Afghan knows, that’s how the Taliban first got its start.
