Corruption delegitimates

By Fester:

The New York Times (h/t Kevin Drum) ran an article a couple of days ago on the Afghan police force in a province near Kabul.  It is not pretty and it illustrates why the Taliban is able to make a credible legitimacy claim:

exasperated American soldiers said it was hard to determine which was their more daunting opponent — the few thousand Taliban who ruled villages through a shadow government of mullahs, or corruption so rife that it had deeply undercut efforts to improve the police and had destroyed many Afghans’ faith in government....

Worse still, by comparison with the government’s exercise of authority, the law imposed by the Taliban is far more certain — quick and clear, if ruthless....“People have no choice but to go to the Taliban to solve their problems...."  When the Taliban were in power in the 1990s, corruption and official bribery were more limited...Residents take complaints to local Taliban leaders, not the police, he said.

The fundamental objective of population centric counter-insurgency is to split the active and hardcore shooters from their covering population base.  This is done by first protecting the contested population from insurgent attacks and retribution and then to provide that civilian population with public goods that the insurgent forces have no chance of matching.  Some of those public goods include education and electricity.  However the more basic goods that are most highly valued are stability, predictability and comparative peace.  The counter-insurgent, having done so, will have denied the insurgent a part of the sea in which he needs to swim in, and can cement local loyalties so that the counter-insurgent force can move onto the next population center.  This path will continuously squeezing the insurgents' base of support until the insurgency collapses. 

Using these metrics of public good provisions, the Taliban in this province seem to be providing the first level public goods of stability, predictably and a decent level of peace far more efficiently and legitimately than the Afghan government forces.  That is not good news.  As Steve has noted earlier this month, the Pakistani Taliban elements also has taken on the role of economic dispute resolution agent from which it gains both legitimacy and revenue.  This is a widespread phenomenon and from the point of view of trying to militarily overwhelm the Taliban, it illustrates the depth of the task.