Afghanistan is a
Winnable War in Progress
M. Ashraf Haidari
November 16, 2011
News reporting out of Afghanistan is punctuated with headlines of “the
unwinnable war,” a summary conclusion entirely based on what is usually not
working in the country. “War correspondents” often cover violence, death, and
destruction in Afghanistan. But they rarely report on what is working in
Afghanistan and how the progress Afghans have so far made, must be consolidated
as irreversible success in the fight against the Taliban. This unconstructive
method of reporting only bolsters the enemy’s anti-government war propaganda,
with negative implications for regional stability and global security. A few
observations are worth mentioning.
First, the arbitrary content of news reports and commentaries only adds fuel
to a political blame-game among the very key stakeholders, who must work
together as partners to address Afghanistan’s multidimensional problems. For
example, the frequent criticism of widespread corruption in the Afghan
government is hardly helpful. It only pits the international community against
the Afghan government, preventing both sides from finding a durable solution to
the problem of corruption. Indeed, however, the problem of corruption must first
be contextually defined or else it remains a buzzword, used and abused by anyone
wanting to vent frustration and shift blame to the Afghan government.
On the Afghan side, corruption is a systemic problem of weak governance due
to a lack of international investment in building the democratic institutions of
“checks and balances” in the Afghan state. Without capacity and resources,
Afghan state institutions cannot execute their constitutional responsibilities
to provide people with such integrated services as security, rule of law, social
protection, and a sustainable livelihood. Of course, a police officer and a
judge, both of whom constitute the eyes and arms of any government respectively,
would hardly be effective in their jobs, if they were not trained, equipped, and
paid adequately. If this problem chronically persists, the incentive for most
law enforcement officials to stay with the government, in an environment of
pervasive insecurity and poverty, will become one of engaging in bribery to
satisfy the basic survival needs of their families and their future.
On the international side, corruption means spending tens of billions of
dollars to prop up parallel structures for unsustainable service delivery in
Afghanistan. As the audit reports of the United States Congress and other
oversight bodies of the donor community demonstrate, much of donor-related
corruption involves the use of private contractors and multiple sub-contractors,
each of which skims off between 20-80% of the donated funds to Afghanistan. The
continued channeling of aid resources through such parallel structures as
predatory contractors, NGOs that never go away, and a spoiled family of the
United Nations agencies undermines the very Afghan state institutions, which
must be built to restore statehood in Afghanistan. After all, the country has a
resilient and enterprising nation, but is in dire need of a functioning state.
Second, the publics in Afghanistan and the donor countries are easily misled,
when all they read in the papers or watch on TV is a heavy dose of sensationally
negative news about every aspect of international engagement in Afghanistan.
Afghans are gradually led to believe in conspiracy theories, asking why the best
armed and equipped forces of more than 40 countries have failed to defeat a weak
insurgency without a national cause. By contrast, the taxpayers in donor
countries may wonder where and how their tax monies have been spent, if the life
of an ordinary Afghan has not changed much, ten years after the fall of the
Taliban. And they can hardly accept the tragedy of losing their sons and
daughters in a far-flung nation, if they are not shown the inextricable link
between their own homeland security and stability in Afghanistan.
Third, indeed, it is the Taliban and their supporters in the region that
stand to gain from a continued miscommunication of facts and mismanagement of
expectations in Afghanistan. And in the uncontrollable battle of perceptions,
the Afghan people and their international supporters stand to lose, even though
the big war of ideas for restoring peace, liberty and pluralism in Afghanistan
is clearly theirs to win.
However, it is not too late for the media to change course and move in the
right direction to call spade a spade in Afghanistan. Adhering to the principles
of good journalism, the news reports out of Afghanistan must always reflect two
indisputable facts.
First, Afghanistan is very much a work in progress. Much progress has been
made over the past ten years, but far more work remains to be done to
consolidate and deepen the institutions of democratic governance in Afghanistan.
Corruption—like elsewhere, including in the developed world—will not disappear
in the country. But the problem will incrementally diminish, as Afghanistan
develops holistically, indeed, by going through the same different stages of
development, which developed and developing countries have over the course of
several decades, if not centuries. Once the status of Afghanistan as a work in
progress is accepted, genuine efforts must be made to learn from the mistakes of
the past 10 years to “do no harm” by enabling Afghanistan to grow a productive
economy. And when this process slowly takes off, the resilience and enterprising
genius of the Afghan people will help deliver their country from its past
miseries, wrought by bad neighbors and the Cold War politics.
Second, parallel to the acceptance of the above fact, the external problem of
insecurity in the form of a weak but destructive insurgency in Afghanistan must
be forcefully acknowledged, because an unstable Afghanistan can destabilize the
region and threaten international security. Key actors in the international
system, led by the United States, must pursue a collective long-term policy of
helping Pakistan end institutional support for extremism and terrorism in the
region. When this genuinely happens, Afghanistan will automatically be secure
and soon on its way towards full integration with the rest of the democratic and
free world.
M. Ashraf Haidari is the Deputy Assistant National Security Advisor of
Afghanistan, who formerly served as the Chargé d’Affaires and Political
Counselor of the Afghan Embassy in Washington DC.
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