One of the biggest disasters in the "war on terror" has been squandering the opportunity of bringing stability to Afghanistan. Although Afghanistan gets none of the coverage that Iraq (and now Lebanon) does, leading many people to think that freedom is on the march there, the situation in Afghanistan hangs by a thread.
The Guardian is now reporting that despite the positive terms in which government officials described the situation last week, that the head of Nato's International Security Force in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Richards, believes the situation is "close to anarchy."
As in Iraq, post-invasion planning centered on the flowers and candy hypothesis:
The assumption within Nato countries had been that the environment in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2002 would be benign
Unlike Iraq the main problem with this thinking lay in the assumption that the occupying powers didn't need to do much more than occupy as opposed to building infrastructure and providing improved services.
General Richards has now
warned that western forces there were short of equipment and were "running out of time" if they were going to meet the expectations of the Afghan people
Last week there were reports that coalition forces had retaken a town from the Taliban, demanding the question as to why it was necessary to retake the town in the first place.
General Richards points out some of the problems in Afghanistan, which are all too familiar. These include:
Corrupt Local Officials
Lack of unity between different agencies
Unethical "poorly regulated private security firms" that are "all too ready to discharge firearms"
Lack of medical evacuation systems and "life-saving equipment," and
Lack of helicopters
All of which brings us back to flowers, not those for liberators, but Afghanistan's main industry--poppies for heroin. In the vacuum created by the lack of serious efforts at nation building, the heroin trade has once again flourished in Afghanistan and it is poised to be the number one exporter of heroin in the world even with the NATO presence. While government ministers in the U.K. have called for the eradication of the poppies, General Richards believes that to do so would only feed the insurgency because the poppies are a cash source for farmers and anti-Taliban warlords. Thus, because not enough has been done to rebuild Afghanistan, NATO apparently has to choose between permitting the cultivation of heroin in the short-term or feeding the insurgency. Lest anyone think the poppies are not a major source of income, the drug trade in Afghanistan brings in approximately one billion pounds per year according to the Guardian.
Given the way in which Iraq has been allowed to descend into Civil War, I'm not surprised that the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. The squandering of the opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan to this point is one of the biggest failures of the Bush Administration to date, particularly as there was tremendous international support to do so in 2001 and 2002.