February 12, 2008
Column: Too soon to give up in Afghanistan
With his fancy hats and fluent English, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan cuts a dashing figure on the international stage. But, while Mr Karzai is a regular at Davos, he keeps a low profile in Afghanistan itself. Holed up in his presidential palace in Kabul, he seemed tired and evasive at a press conference there last week.
Mr Karzai’s erratic behaviour is just one reason for fearing for the future of Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency is still raging across the country. Suicide attacks are occurring at eight times the rate they were in 2006. Diplomats in Kabul are told not to visit restaurants or markets. Last week an International Monetary Fund report portrayed the Afghan economy as based on opium and aid.
Open bickering has broken out within the international coalition that is trying to shore up Afghanistan. The Canadians, who hold the vital region around Kandahar, are threatening to withdraw their 2,500 troops unless allies send reinforcements. Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has criticised the counterinsurgency efforts of Nato allies.
The remainder of this column can be read here. Please post comments below.
Mr Rachman– To your credit, through this blog, you provide an exceptional degree of transparency as to the “process” behind your art. In recent days, you have described how, indeed, you were embedded in the Rice-Miliband entourage/motorcade into Kabul. One can presume fairly that the super PR agencies who manage the messages for the US and UK government made certain you were well provided for throughout your journeys. We have no reason to suspect that your clothes were at risk of becoming as tattered as John Simpson’s.
Most here know that this is how the system works. Some participants here are workign for it. I write this for the students and other neophyte eyes who may actually think you are a free-thinking journalist.
For those of us who do not enjoy paid delivery of the “FT”–in print or online, we must ask why we pay to read the policy art of countries that extract taxes from us at micro and macro terms.
Nice article, but I am nostalgic for the days not so long ago when FT journalists were the hardest nuts for Burston-Marstellar or McCann-Erickson to crack. There never was any chance of you being put on an unscheduled flight with Blackwater workers was there? Much less bumping into anyone randomly in an airport.
More interesting diversions will await your retirement.
Posted by: WCM | February 12th, 2008 at 8:33 am | Report this commentMr Rachman - You are a smart guy, but we readers are not all that much less smart.
If you can reply “Yes” to any of the following questions then, perhaps, “Too soon to give up in Afghanistan” is a reasonable statement to make. If your answer is “No” to all the questions below, then I must conclude that you are just another self-serving humbug.
1- Have you lived in Afghanistan at any time during your life?
Posted by: Alfred | February 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm | Report this comment2- Do you have relatives who have lived there over the past 10 years (not as journalists, diplomats or NGO employees)?
3- Are any of your kids or brothers, if you have any, serving in the military in Afghanistan?
4- Do you speak either of the two main languages of Afghanistan, Farsi or Pashto?
Maybe this is a naive question but it keeps springing to mind in relation to Afghanistan: why don’t Western goverments simply buy the opium? It does after all have medical as well as narcotic uses, in fact it is actually grown in Tasmania.
Posted by: Johnstone | February 12th, 2008 at 12:12 pm | Report this commentJoschka Fischer, foreign minister in the previous German socialist-green Schoeder coalition; wrote the following piece in die Zeit which has caused quite the ruckus in Germany:
http://www.zeit.de/online/2008/06/Montagskolumne-Joschka-Fischer-Afghanistan
Essentially he says Germany should commit to increasing troops in Afgahnistan and should engage in combat vs the Taliban. Not only because he feel 9/11, terror attacks in Europe and treaty obligations justify the fight but also because it has hurt Germany’s standing tremendously that while Canadian, Dutch, English and US allies die fighting the Germans idle.
This from one of the most left wing politicians who used to throw rocks at police calling them imperialist swine and worse.
Public opinion in Europe is anti-Bush and is thinking of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as related American postcolonial ventures for which 9/11 was the excuse, not the reason. It is a public opinion informed by a media driven by competition for eyeballs and advertising revenue. The need to inform the public objectively takes third seat to sensationalism and to the ghastly relativism that hides behind the need to give even the most ludicrously radical voices a platform as a counterbalance to a story in the name of objectivity.
Like Fischer said, after Bush is gone the next President, whomever it may be, will only increase pressure on Europe to commit more. European public opinion is thoroughly unprepared for what will be required of us, European media and politicians don’t focus on the inadequacy of our armed forces for the tasks that lies ahead. Most armed forces in Europe are already overstretched and underfunded.
DKM’s comment in the last post
http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2008/02/column-us-optim.html#comment-101152758
illustrates what challenges lie ahead as climate change will cause massive dislocations and migrations that, if left unmanaged, will spin out of control.
As for Afganistan, legalizing drugs in western markets will go a long way towards ending Afghan grief. Besides, I certainly don’t need a government to tell me what substance I should or shouldn’t use and for the life of me I can’t figure out why it should assume such a paternalist role.
Posted by: felix drost, amsterdam | February 12th, 2008 at 12:53 pm | Report this commentJohnstone, I think you’ve hit on the pertinent point. Why don’t western governments simply buy the opium? For me it is exactly the same reasoning as having our armed forces in Afghanistan. It keeps the problem over there rather than allowing the drug pushers and terrorists to export heroin and terror to western cities. For whatever it would cost, the price would be a lot cheaper than the damage we currently suffer from drugs.
Posted by: AYC | February 12th, 2008 at 1:12 pm | Report this commentLet’s takle this tiny bit of Rachman’s column:
/quote/The west clearly was far too complacent about Afghanistan. In 2003 Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, proclaimed that the war was over. But by then an anti-Nato insurgency was beginning in the Afghan countryside./unquote/
1. It wasn’t “the west”, whatever that is, that was far too complacent. The U.S. shunned NATO offers up to 2003. It was the U.S. and the Bush regime that was complacent, not “the west”.
2. So in 2003 the “an anti-Nato insurgency was beginning”. That is simply impossible. ISAF was founded after UN Resolution 1510 passed by the UNSC on 13 October 2003. There was hardly any NATO in Afghanistan in 2003. How then can there have been an “anti-NATO insurgency”???
Of the 3 million in Kabul, 2.8 million live in slums. There is max 3 hours of electricity per day in the capital city.
The column is disinformation and not based on facts.
The Pashtun don’t like to be occupied by foreign
troops and will get rid of them like they have done for thousands years.
“The west” will have to accept that just as others had to do earlier.
Posted by: b | February 12th, 2008 at 3:41 pm | Report this comment@Johnstone
To call Joshka Fischer a “left” is hardly reality. He is a German version of “neocon” that has moved from the aggressive left in his youth to the interventionist crowd on the right.
He certainly doesn’t represent anything on the “left” in Germany.
Posted by: b | February 12th, 2008 at 3:44 pm | Report this commentThe Afghan Taliban appears better organized today than in 2001, they are constantly recruiting and the criminal gangs and the corruption in the government actually helps them. I think the current situation in Afghanistan is looking more like Iraq in 2006 …which is very unnerving…. Taliban fighters appear to understand there is a great deal of disarray and disagreement among NATO countries…they want to overturn the government…they may just eventually do that…time is on there side. There have been hints and attempts to negotiate with them before…perhaps that should be attemped again before all hell breaks out as predicted this spring. Even though many of the Taliban tactics could be seen as acts of terrorism, unlike Hamas they have NEVER been put on a “terrorist list” by US or Britain. I assume that is because the US and Britain wanted at least the option to negotiate …I fear the Taliban Pakistan and the Taliban Afghanistan along with militants and warlords working in concert could prove to be a formidable enemy and they know the terrain …which is vast, mysterious and very alien to NATO forces
Posted by: Lisa-Helene Lawson | February 12th, 2008 at 10:08 pm | Report this comment