That would be Hamid Karzai, President of Kabul Afghanistan, and what he has to say isn’t exactly the sort of message the Bush administration wants you to hear:
Hamid Karzai has said instability in Afghanistan is a huge threat to peace and prosperity in the wider region.
At an Indian conference, the Afghan president said poor infrastructure and inconsistent policies were hampering regional economic co-operation.
Mr Karzai’s comments follow a warning by the UN World Food Programme that it cannot feed millions of Afghans who will depend on it during the winter. […]
“Today there are a host of other factors – from fragility of security to inadequate physical infrastructure to inconsistent policies which play to the detriment to the regional economic cooperation.”
He added that if the economy were more developed, there would be less support for the Taleban insurgency and fewer farmers would turn to the booming opium trade.
You see, Mr. Bush would prefer that Karzai stick to the administration’s talking points regarding how Afghanistan is flowering in an outbreak of freedom and transformational democracy since the US and Northern Alliance forces drove the Taliban regime from power back in 2002.
Sadly (for Bush), Mr. Karzai insists on playing the reality card. He continues to complain publicly about the growing resurgence of the Taliban, and about their safe harbors in Pakistan from which they mount their murderous campaigns. And he continues to point out that Osama Bin Laden, the man who was actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks, has still not been captured or killed, and is likely still residing safely just across Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.
How rude of him.
On the other hand, speaking the truth is always deemed an offensive act by the Bush administration. And the plain truth is that we have dropped the ball when it comes to securing the future stability and security of Afghanistan.
(cont)
Here’s what’s been happening over there while the Presidential eye has been focused on Iraq.
First off, the production of opium is up — way up and it’s funding the Taliban insurgency:
KABUL, Afghanistan — Farmers now planting opium poppies in Afghanistan will probably reap a harvest comparable to this year’s record crop, in part because insurgents are preventing effective counternarcotics work, officials said Thursday. […]
Drug production has skyrocketed since a U.S.-led offensive toppled the Taliban regime five years ago. Last spring’s poppy harvest accounted for 92 percent of the global opium supply and was enough to make 610 tons of heroin–more than all the world’s addicts consume in a year.
Police and government officials are said to be implicated in the trade, which adds to the corruption and lawlessness threatening Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy. The Taliban had all but eradicated opium cultivation by 2000 but now allegedly profits from it, protecting poppy farmers. […]
The United Nations’ anti-drug chief said recently that proceeds from Afghan opium production are being used to finance terrorist groups.
[A] U.S. official said the country’s drug trade was a $3.1 billion business this year and it doesn’t “take much of that to fund terrorism.”
The security situation in the country has deteriorated to such an extent that former warlords and militia commanders in the Northern provinces, who willingly surrendered their weapons to the United Nations after the Taliban was initially defeated, are now demanding them back so that they can protect themselves from Taliban attacks:
The rise of the Taliban insurgency in southern Afghanistan threatens to destabilize the country’s north, where militia commanders are openly calling for their men to be re-armed.
Some of the northern militia commanders agreed to hand over their weapons to the United Nations after the overthrow of the Taliban.
But if the West doesn’t help, they say they will turn to Russia for the guns.
Indeed, Karzai’s security forces, and the NATO and American forces who support his government, are viewed as having been ineffective in stopping the return of Taliban fighters, and in halting the increase in violence associated with that resurgence across the country:
Military officials here say pro-government forces need to win key areas soon and to begin delivering aid and security if they are to halt the slide in public support.
“We can’t just keep fighting endless battles without having something to offer the next day,” a senior Western military official said. “We have killed a lot of Taliban, but they are not running out of foot soldiers, and for every one we kill, we create new families that hate us.”
Hanging over this failure to adequately secure the countryside outside Kabul hangs the spectre of open civil war between the various ethnic groups and tribes that comprise present day Afghanistan:
Inside Afghanistan, persistent and widening attacks by anti-government insurgents have provided ethnic militia leaders in both the north and south with an excuse to regroup and potentially rearm their forces, many of which were disbanded after 2001 under an ambitious, U.N.-sponsored program.
In the Pashtun south, where Afghan army and police forces are underpaid, poorly equipped and scattered thinly across the conflict zone, the government has authorized local police forces to form auxiliary contingents, most likely drawing on idle former militiamen. In some cases, tribal leaders have threatened to form their own defense forces.
In the north and west, dominated by the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups, former Islamic militia figures who fought Soviet troops in the 1980s are said to virtually control daily life in many areas. Despite a new program to disarm and pacify the region, Afghan and foreign observers said some commanders appear to be gaining further strength as the Taliban threat draws closer and villagers seek powerful patrons to protect them.
“In the north, they ask how they can be expected to disarm if the south is arming itself,” said one Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. Ethnic divisions are so deep in Afghanistan, the diplomat added, that if the Karzai government were to fall, civil conflict might resume almost immediately.
In short, Afghanistan is once more a failed state slipping into chaos, anarchy and narcoterrorism. That result is creating problems not just for Karzai’s regime, but also for Pakistan and President Musharraf, who has had to fight off coup attempts and missile attacks on his residence from Islamic extremists within his own military and intelligence service who have ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as terrorist groups operating in the disputed province of Kashmir. Which, of course has an immediate bearing on India’s security situation, since they cannot be pleased with the increasing risk that radical Islamists who support the terrorist groups operating inside India may depose Musharraf and acquire control over Pakistan’s nuclear forces.
Needless to say, all of this turmoil is not good news for American interests in South and Central Asia. And who is to blame for this outcome if not President Bush and his neocon advisors who were so keen on invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein before they had finished the job in Afghanistan? Their obsession with Iraq led to the diversion of military and economic resources desperately needed in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, we are demonstrating to the world (and especially to our enemies) that we lack the capability to secure either Afghanistan or Iraq, much less both of them. With both countries now facing the disaster of an internal civil war and ethnic strife, it has become clear that America lacks the political leadership, the financial and military resources, the diplomatic skill and the moral authority needed to clean up the mess Bush has created with his ill-conceived “War on Terror.” The consequences of his “catastrophic success” will be with us for generations to come.
And with the Afghani and Iraqi peoples, as well.
