Walt's been reading A Short History of World War I, by James L. Stokesbury. (Quill, New York, 1981) Dr. Stokesbury was a professor of history at Acadian University. Like many historians, he developed a realistic and therefore somewhat jaundiced view of human nature. Here's a quote from the beginning of Chapter 8 of his book.
It is a rare people -- or state -- who, caught in a bad war, can have either sufficient sense or sufficient control over events to get out of it. Wars are meant to be won, and government do not readily confess to mistakes, especially after they have killed several million of their citizens in the making of them. As soon as it became apparent to the belligerents that they were not going to achieve victory by late 1914, they began a frantic search for some magic ingredient that would solve their problems.
Although millions of Western civilians have not been killed in NATO's adventure in Afghanistan, several thousand NATO troops (and a few civilians) have come home in body bags, and support for the war in Canada, France, Britain and even the USA is at an all-time low. So now the frantic search has begun in earnest. Plus ça change...
Trouble is, the "magic ingredient" is proving just as hard to find as it was in 1914-18. New technologies, which hastened the end of World War I, aren't prevailing against the backward but deadly devices of the Taliban: IEDs and suicide bombers, for instance. Today a suicide bomber blew himself up in a wedding hall in northern Afghanistan, killing more than 20 people including a well-known commander.
The only good thing about that attack is that no NATO troops got killed, unlike last week when six American soldiers were killed in the volatile Wardak region. What killed them? An IED. Who killed them? The Taliban.
Yes, gentle reader, the Taliban is still fighting the infidels, and the assorted Afghan tribes are still fighting with each other. Those people live in that country, and they're not going away. Plus ça change.
Only we Westerners are going away. The French are leaving (early) at the end of the year. The Canadians, in typical Canuck fashion, have left... except for the 1000 or so that are still there enjoying Tim Horton's coffee and donuts while they train the so-called Afghan army to, errr, kill other Afghans. Or whoever happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The magic ingredient that is so sorely needed is an exit strategy. Faut de mieux, NATO has decided to buy its way out of the sandpit. A week ago, Afghanistan's "democratically elected president" Karzai took his rather large begging bowl to an international donors’ conference in Tokyo. He came away with a pisspot ["begging bowl", surely! Ed.] full of "conscience money": $16,000,000,000 in pledges to be exact.
In exchange for the 16 billion -- only a fraction of the billions that have already been spent on the futile invasion of one of the poorest and most backward "nations" on earth -- Krazai pledged, amont other things, to step up the fight against the corruption for which his country and the prez himself are famous.
Writing in the Globe and Mail, Roland Paris, director of the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa, says we would be wrong to place too much faith in Karzai's commitment.
There is virtually no chance that the Afghan government will tackle corruption – and everyone knows it. President Hamid Karzai has made similar commitments for years, yet not a single high-level official has been convicted for graft, in a country whose public sector ranks as the third-most corrupt in the world, according to Transparency International.
The hope seems to be that ongoing international financial support for the Afghan government -- plus continuing occupation by a few thousand US troops -- will be sufficient to avert a sweeping military victory by the Taliban, or a return to the civil war that raged in the 90s.
What do the Afghans think? By all accounts, the country’s major parties are rewinding their turbans and quietly rearming themselves in anticipation of a collapse of the Afghan government and a return to civil war, about 37 seconds after NATO forces and the main body of Americans leave.
Roland Paris, again. The message to Afghanistan’s parties and factions seems clear: “We will continue to support and subsidize the Afghan government for many years. There is no need to prepare for a possible collapse. Remain calm.” It’s not clear whether Afghans find this message adequately convincing.
For taxpayers in donor countries, it is an even tougher sell, particularly at a time of fiscal retrenchment. Why should we continue to provide billions of dollars to a regime and country where corruption is not just a problem but an integral part of the governing system? Our governments have difficulty answering this question truthfully. For them, losing enormous sums of money to graft may be an acceptable price to avoid an even costlier repetition of history.
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