30 January 2015
Wars fade from consciousness as new conflicts seize attention. The war in Afghanistan, once constantly in the headlines, has slipped down the agenda since the American-led coalition forces formally ended combat operations in December last year. But it goes on, and it goes on pretty ferociously. This week three American contractors and an Afghan were killed in the base near Kabul from which air strikes on Taliban targets are mounted, while 16 people were killed and 39 injured in a suicide bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan. Another 11 were killed and several injured in a Taliban attack on a checkpoint.
Both the major attacks seem to have been insider operations of the kind which plagued Afghan and coalition forces in the past, and they indicate the vulnerability of the remaining western military missions in the country, of the civilian contractors who work with them, and of the Afghan security forces themselves. A man joins the police, or gets a job with a contractor, or enrols in a village militia. In spite of tightened vetting procedures, he is not recognised as an infiltrator, and a few days or weeks later he blows himself and many others up, or opens fire on his supposed comrades. An appalling toll of lost lives is the consequence. The war is stealthy, unfair and cruel: open combat between armed fighters is probably now the exception rather than the rule.
Measuring how that war is going will be harder in the future because the US government has decided to classify information which has been publicly available for the last six years. Figures on American military spending and on the state of the Afghan forces will from now on be unavailable, and critics suspect the motive is to avoid publicity when those figures look bad, although the stated reason is that the information could be useful to the enemy. The truth about the war may well be that neither side is in good shape. Unlike Islamic State, with which dissidents within the Taliban are reportedly drawing unfavourable comparisons, the Taliban does not control a large tract of territory and certainly not one including urban centres.
What they do have is a continuing capacity to wreck normal life whenever and wherever it shows signs of becoming established. This in itself will not win the war for them, but it will help lose the war for the Kabul side if the government does not make real progress on many fronts, in building and renewing infrastructure, in reviving the economy, in dealing with corruption, in education, in health, in policing. This is exactly what the country’s new leader, President Ashraf Ghani, promised during the election campaign last year. President Ghani is a World Bank and United Nations development expert who ran programmes in China, India and Russia. He has had a detailed plan for Afghanistan in his briefcase since he first campaigned for the presidency in 2009. No man could be better prepared for the task of pulling Afghanistan out of the mire of war, poverty and backwardness. He has almost too many policies in his quiver.
Yet the record has not been that impressive since he took over. After three months he still does not have a cabinet. He and Abdullah Abdullah, his former rival for the presidency and now his chief executive, took their time working out a compromise.
Now he is at loggerheads with warlords and other big men in the provinces who deem their interests or their ethnic group to have been ill-treated, and with a parliament which is blocking his choices for ministers for largely venal reasons. One proposed minister withdrew his candidacy because he said that MPs would vote for him only if he promised them or their relatives lucrative government jobs, most of them in the customs service, a notorious hotbed of corruption.
The key to why this shambles is happening is the concept of government as a spoils system in which offices and their perquisites are shared out according to the existing pattern of power, and according to who shouts loudest or threatens most effectively. Ruling the country efficiently and pursuing the war come a bad second. This is what President Ghani has to overcome: a political class which doesn’t want to lose the war but which still thinks the gravy train can go rolling on for ever.
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