Tom Friedman Unloads On COINdinista Pony Plan

By Steve Hynd

Tom Friedman must have already read that op-ed by John Nagl and Ricahrd Fontaine I posted about on Monday, the one where they very weakly tried to argue that it doesn't have to matter if Karzai wins a rigged election or is so corrupt as to make a Chicago politician blush. I've been very critical in the past of his idea that Afghans are just savage children the West can bribe into submission with candy and dollars, but I may have to forgive him at least a little of his many past idiocies. In his latest op-ed, he unloads on the notion of doing nation-building in a nation where someone like Karzai is in charge.

I am not sure Washington fully understands just how much the Taliban-led insurgency is increasingly an insurrection against the behavior of the Karzai government — not against the religion or civilization of its international partners. And too many Afghan people now blame us for installing and maintaining this government.

...Talking to Afghanistan experts in Kabul, Washington and Berlin, a picture is emerging: The Karzai government has a lot in common with a Mafia family. Where a “normal” government raises revenues from the people — in the form of taxes — and then disperses them to its local and regional institutions in the form of budgetary allocations or patronage, this Afghan government operates in the reverse. The money flows upward from the countryside in the form of payments for offices purchased or “gifts” from cronies.

What flows from Kabul, the experts say, is permission for unfettered extraction, protection in case of prosecution and punishment in case the official opposes the system or gets out of line. In “Karzai World,” it appears, slots are either sold (to people who buy them in order to make a profit) or granted to cronies, or are given away to buy off rivals.

We have to be very careful that we are not seen as the enforcers for this system.

It's already too late for that. U.S. troops are Karzai's enforcers; he wouldn't last a second without those troops and he knows it, which is why he's so hot for a troop increase. But Afghan voters don't believe a run-off election will be any fairer than the first leg and Karzai's supporters are being mobilized to press for Karzai to be re-elected as the easier course. 

Even General McChrystal has belatedly admitted that there's no number of US troops that can definitely overcome the massive pressure towards insurgency that corruption creates in Afghanistan, which makes Friedman's conclusion, for once, eminently sensible.

This is crazy. We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people.

If Karzai says no, then there is only one answer: “You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this.” (Cue the helicopters.)

So, please, spare me the lectures about how important Afghanistan and Pakistan are today. I get the stakes. But we can’t want a more decent Afghanistan than the country’s own president. If we do, we have no real local partner who will be able to hold the allegiance of the people, and we will not succeed — whether with more troops, more drones or more money.

There's no indication that any alternative to Karzai would be any less corrupt, any more legitimate. Quite the reverse, in fact. Which makes the whole exersize one in futility. We should therefore immediately default to Friedman's only answer: cue the helicopters.