source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/high-cost-of-a-quick-cheap-war/2007/03/09/1173166991652.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
A sad reality dawning on those who watch Afghanistan is that little
has changed since the US-led invasion of 2001.
The Taliban were not defeated; they simply melted away - intact. The
warlords who tore the country apart in the 1990s still have their
fiefdoms and various new cloaks of respectability - they are MPs, they
are advisers to the Karzai Government and they are two-timing friends
of the US.
What has changed as Afghanistan's 30-year war continues is the size of
the pot from which they feed - a burgeoning opium trade from which all
drew their cut of more than $US2.3 billion ($3 billion) last year.
It is the curse of the new Afghanistan: without security there is no
reconstruction; the Taliban and the warlords stoke the insecurity, and
the opium traffickers pay them handsomely; in the absence of security,
many Afghans sit on the fence - waiting to see who will win.
So far more than 33,000 NATO and US soldiers have been unable to break
this vicious circle.
Washington thought it could have a "quick, cheap peace" after a
"quick, cheap war", as the International Crisis Group describes it.
But while the US has squandered hundreds of billions on the Iraq
bonfire, the NATO-US force has chased the shadow of the Taliban, but
never nailed them...
A Western security analyst in the south of the country told the Herald
this week: "Most of the south today is like the Moscow-controlled
Afghanistan of the 1980s - the Soviets had control of Kabul and the
smaller district centres, but the mujahideen controlled the rest of
the country. Today it is the Taliban."
The word surge is not in Washington's Afghan lexicon. But the odds
stacked against the US in Baghdad are becoming apparent here as, just
as in Iraq, the Americans are scrambling too late to send too few
extra soldiers and not enough cash in an attempt to recover an
enterprise that did not have to be so precariously placed five years
after the ouster of the Taliban.
Afghanistan always was the more legitimate incursion: the Taliban were
harbouring Osama bin Laden and refused to hand him over after the
September 11 attacks in the US.
But, starved of resources and attention as the Americans bolted for
Baghdad, Washington's Afghan desk is now beset by the same
difficulties it confronts in Iraq: hesitant allies, interfering
neighbours, a weak and corrupt central government and, back home, a
race against the clock of public opinion...
Training the Afghans is a laborious task. The Taliban pay their
fighters higher wages, and levels of desertion and corruption in the
government forces are high. A well-placed foreign source in Kandahar
told the Herald that NATO was being dragged unwittingly into the drug
trade, because corrupt Afghan military officers were slipping opium-
and heroin-laden Afghan military vehicles into NATO convoys for
greater ease of movement around the country.
But apart from London and Warsaw, which are sending a couple of
thousand more troops, few other nations have responded to the plea to
NATO by the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, in January.
"Every one of us must take a hard look at what more we can do to help
the Afghan people and to support one another," she said.
There are 37 national flags, including Australia's, and a total of
33,000-plus troops. But only the Americans, Canadians, British and
Dutch do the heavy fighting. To varying degrees, all the other
governments refuse to have their troops on the front line.
General Richards describes the foreign forces interplay as "close to
anarchy".
Afghans shake their heads at the constant rotation of foreigners,
especially of senior officials; at the seeming failure to build
corporate knowledge; and at the foreigners' lurching from one
capital's preferred response to the Taliban to that of the next one
that rotates through the leadership.
General Richards has gone home, and analysts expect a marked change in
the tone of the NATO campaign. The Englishman has been replaced by Dan
McNeill, a US general known in some quarters as "Bomber" because of
his preference for air strikes.
British diplomats have succumbed to trading insults with their Afghan
counterparts and ignoring each other, because of Kabul's accusations
that London, which donates almost $US500 million a year and has 5000-
plus troops in the line of fire, is conspiring with Islamabad to
surrender the southern borderlands to Pakistan...
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks Afghanistan might have
been an uplifting story: al-Qaeda and the Taliban routed and the
massive resources squandered on an unwinnable war in Iraq being used
to nurture a sustainable and genuine democracy in a hard-bitten and
neglected corner of the Islamic world.
But only a fraction of the manpower and aid deployed to Iraq is
allocated for Afghanistan. The country and its population are bigger
than Iraq, but the foreign force is only a fifth of that in Iraq.
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Slide show and videos about Afghanistan:
http://www.smh.com.au/multimedia/afghanistan/main.html
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