The Failed State of Afghanistan

By BJ

A couple of weeks ago, Fester noted that one the cornerstones of the US's counterinsurgency doctrine is to build legitimacy for the host government, (never an easy thing when the host government is viewed as a puppet of the occupation forces).

The most important public good is security within a framework of the rule of law. Rule of law means predictability in that certain actions are punished with a known and high probability, other actions are known to be rewarded and another class of actions are shrugged at.

It came to mind when I saw this story at McClatchy:

Ghulam Farooq Hussainkhel lives on the outskirts of the Afghan capital in the latest district to fall under Taliban influence. A teacher, Hussainkhel moved last year from a neighboring district after surviving three Taliban assassination attempts for opening two girls' schools.

Taliban forces now occupy positions just five miles away from his home in Charasayab and terrorize his neighbors at night with demands that they house and feed their forces.

Hussainkhel, 53, fears they could one day force him to close the school system he now runs in the modest suburb south of Kabul, a one-street town at the base of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The Taliban, however, isn't the biggest security threat, he said. It's the criminal gangs who roam the capital, kidnapping middle-class citizens for ransom.

. . .

Kabul's growing crime problem is more than a security issue — it's a sign of a failing government. If government security forces — whom many charge with complicity in the crime wave — can't protect the populace from thugs, how can they protect remote parts of the country from an increasingly armed, financed and organized Taliban, residents say. More U.S. troops around the capital may not be the answer.

Residents have lived under Taliban control before and they know how to measure its influence, they said. They can cut deals. Criminal gangs roaming the streets, however, are new.

The article goes on to note that the Taliban and criminal gangs can afford to pay the police and army better than the Afghan government, and that many of the uniformed Afghan security forces take that money to supplement their paltry pay. It is, however, not the root of the problem, but a symptom of it. As Fester noted in his post, none of the government forces are doing any actual police work. They are trained to act as military forces fighting an insurgency, and the result is a vacuum in the rule of law that criminal gangs, and those very same insurgents, can exploit. With no rule of law, security forces become just another kind of protection racket. It becomes "pay to play", and the Taliban can pay better. Probably the most significant line in the McClatchy article is where it notes that the Director for Criminal Investigations for the Kabul police force uses a private security force for his own protection. And the US plan to send in more troops?

The additional 3,500 "helps somehow but not enough to make a change," said Abbas Noyan, a member of parliament who represents Kabul province. More troops won't prosecute gangs, drug dealers and end rampant corruption, he said.

The Taliban is filling in the gaps, providing their own local law courts and providing the kind of stability the central government cannot, hollowing out the state and recreating their own. It may be the best the Afghan people can hope for in the near term, and that says a lot about just how bad the situation is.