A cautionary tale on Afghanistan The wrong model Dan Restrepo* | International Herald Tribune | January 29, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/29/opinion/edrest.php As the most significant political scandal in at least a generation rocks the foundations of Colombian democracy, the Bush administration paradoxically appears to have selected it as a model for the path forward in Afghanistan. Last week, President George W. Bush nominated William Wood, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, to be Washington's next chief envoy in Kabul. Two days later, while visiting Bogotá, General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held up Colombia as a shining example for the Afghani government. Although Colombia's decades- long struggles against narco- trafficking and insurgencies certainly offer lessons for Afghanistan, they are not the road map to success suggested by the Bush administration. Instead, Colombia's experiences offer cautionary tales for Afghanistan as it wrestles with the resurgent Taliban and a booming heroin trade. The first object lesson is found in the political crisis gripping Colombia. The erstwhile public secret of the deep connections between Colombia's political and governing class and narco-terrorist paramilitary organizations has begun to unravel. Formal charges have been brought against numerous members of Congress; scores of other politicians from across Colombia's political spectrum have been openly tied to the country's paramilitaries and the investigation is seemingly just beginning. Last week, the first Colombian paramilitary leader confessed his murderous past in the government's effort to demobilize tens of thousands of combatants in the country's three-sided armed conflict. He began laying out details of years of close cooperation between the paramilitaries, the Colombian military, and local, state, and national political leaders. Colombia's long struggle with powerful drug lords underscores the threat these individuals and organizations pose to democratic institutions. If Colombia, a country with a long tradition of democracy, has been compromised, the challenge for the fledgling Afghani democracy is even greater. The persistence of the Colombian drug trade highlights the second lesson Colombia has to offer Afghanistan. Eradication and enforcement alone do not lead to the promised land of success. If they did, Colombia would have brought its narcotics problem under control. Afghanistan, like Colombia, needs to understand the importance of providing alternative economic avenues for those cultivating the raw materials of its drug trade. It also needs consumer countries around the world to take greater responsibility for addressing the public health crises within their borders fueling the drug trafficking scourge. Unfortunately, as can be seen from the composition of the roughly $700 million of U.S. assistance to Colombia in each of the past six years, economic alternatives and social investment often get short shrift in U.S.-sponsored counter-narcotic strategy. The limitations on the effectiveness of eradication are even more pronounced in Afghanistan than in Colombia. The bane of Colombia's existence the coca plant in contrast is a perennial that requires years of maturation to generate a productive harvest. Colombia's various approaches to combating one of the world's longest running insurgencies the FARC offers significant pause for Afghanistan. Colombia's efforts against the FARC were hampered in the late 1990s when the Colombian government ceded a huge swath of its territory to the rebel army in a doomed effort to jump-start peace talks. With breathing room, the FARC was able to mount the greatest threat to the existence of the Colombian state it has mustered in its 40-plus years. To its credit, the Colombian government reversed this approach and has begun to regain the upper hand against the FARC. Unfortunately for Afghanistan, the Taliban have found safe haven in Pakistani territory. Unless Afghanistan gets the unlikely cooperation of Pakistan and sustained NATO and U.S. efforts on the Afghan-Pakistan border, the Taliban may well benefit from the same kind of breathing room that made the FARC ever more lethal. The Colombianization of U.S.-Afghanistan policy is rife with peril, not the least because it is unclear that U.S. policy in Colombia has been a success or that Colombia is the shining example the administration would like to believe. *Dan Restrepo is director of The Americas Project at the Center for American Progress. This article first appeared in the Boston Globe.
