I've just read Sarah Chayes' "Punishment of Virtue", a book about Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban and before their return. The world that Chayes, a ground level journalist and NGO operator living in Kandahar, paints is that of a place in which there is almost no loyalty to the idea of Afghanistan as a nation. Loyalties are almost invariably toward family and tribe. If you hold public office, you do so to get what you, your family and your tribe can get out of it and not what you can do to build a better Afghanistan. Everybody has to be very careful about whose toes they might step on. Corruption is endemic and "warlordism" is rampant. Opium is the principal export product, with Afghan poppy growers providing about 90% of the world's supply. Foreign governments, especially Pakistan, are pulling strings that control wherever they can.
A recent news article said that various international agencies and thinktanks, including the World Bank, see President Karzai as an ineffectual leader and see Afghanistan as lacking a credible public service. I saw Karzai interviewed on TV recently, and he came through as a person who saw all of the problems, but none of the solutions. It may just be that there are no solutions except those provided by family and tribe. It may also be that the current western effort to build "freedom and democracy" will continue to grind down, that the Taliban will again take over and that Afghans will once again be vindicated in believing that their welfare lies in kindred blood and belonging. Afghanistan does not seem like a place we can fix and it makes one wonder what we are doing there other than helping to support the increasingly tenuous power of the American empire. About the only thing one regularly reads about the country is that more of our young men and women have died there. If NATO, including Canada, pulled out, the Afghans would have to solve their own problems. Perhaps that's the best thing that could happen to them. Ed
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