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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / The NYTimes is SO OVER Afghanistan

The NYTimes is SO OVER Afghanistan

by Anne Laurie|  May 7, 20133:33 am| 14 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Foreign Affairs, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, WTF?

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I figured someone in the daylight crew would’ve posted this already, because, well…

Karzai Says He Was Assured C.I.A. Would Continue Delivering Bags of Cash
KABUL, Afghanistan — The C.I.A.’s station chief here met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured that the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has erupted since the payments were disclosed.

The C.I.A. money, Mr. Karzai told reporters, was “an easy source of petty cash,” and some of it was used to pay off members of the political elite, a group dominated by warlords.

The use of the C.I.A. cash for payoffs has prompted criticism from many Afghans and some American and European officials, who complain that the agency, in its quest to maintain access and influence at the presidential palace, financed what is essentially a presidential slush fund. The practice, the officials say, effectively undercut a pillar of the American war strategy: the building of a clean and credible Afghan government to wean popular support from the Taliban.

Instead, corruption at the highest levels seems to have only worsened. The International Monetary Fund recently warned diplomats in Kabul that the Afghan government faced a potentially severe budget shortfall partly because of the increasing theft of customs duties and officially abetted tax evasion.

On Saturday, Mr. Karzai sought to dampen the furor over the payments, describing them as one facet of the billions of dollars in aid Afghanistan receives each year. “This is nothing unusual,” he said…

Which reminded me that I’d bookmarked, but never posted, a related article at the end of April:

KABUL, Afghanistan — It is always hard to gauge what diplomats really think unless one of their cables ends up on WikiLeaks, but every once in a while, the barriers fall and a bit of truth slips into public view…

…[O]ne of those rare truth-telling moments came at a farewell cocktail party last week hosted by the departing French ambassador to Kabul: Bernard Bajolet, who is leaving to head France’s Direction Génerale de la Sécurité Extérieure, its foreign intelligence service.

After the white-coated staff passed the third round of hors d’oeuvres, Mr. Bajolet took the lectern and laid out a picture of how France — a country plagued by a slow economy, waning public support for the Afghan endeavor and demands from other foreign conflicts, including Syria and North Africa — looked at Afghanistan….

That the Afghan project is on thin ice and that, collectively, the West was responsible for a chunk of what went wrong, though much of the rest the Afghans were responsible for. That the West had done a good job of fighting terrorism, but that most of that was done on Pakistani soil, not on the Afghan side of the border. And that without fundamental changes in how Afghanistan did business, the Afghan government, and by extension the West’s investment in it, would come to little.

His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact.

“I still cannot understand how we, the international community, and the Afghan government have managed to arrive at a situation in which everything is coming together in 2014 — elections, new president, economic transition, military transition and all this — whereas the negotiations for the peace process have not really started,” Mr. Bajolet said in his opening comments…

“We should be lucid: a country that depends almost entirely on the international community for the salaries of its soldiers and policemen, for most of its investments and partly on it for its current civil expenditure, cannot be really independent.”

I do not pretend to understand what these trends might portend in the larger world, but one thing’s pretty clear: the Very Serious Persons responsible for publishing the NYTimes are beyond bored with the whole “Afghanistan (Graveyard of Empires) Adventure”. As far as they’re concerned, it’s time to cut our losses and move the Risk markers to a new, less predictable failure arena. Syria? Iran? North Korea? Who cares, as long as it’s novel!

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Reader Interactions

14Comments

  1. 1.

    Louis

    May 7, 2013 at 4:03 am

    Ten NZers dead in that little tussle. I sometimes wonder why our boys were killing people up there.
    Little national pride moment, forgive me, but our SAS did a good job in Afghanistan.
    Someday this war will be over.

  2. 2.

    Mino

    May 7, 2013 at 4:30 am

    The West was widely criticized for “abandoning” Afghanistan after they fought our proxy war with Russia. Maybe we did them a favor by getting out. I suspect the outcome would have and will be the same. Any western investment will be destroyed by the fundamentalists again as they regain power. The people will allow it because they despise their elite and are war exhausted.

  3. 3.

    NotMax

    May 7, 2013 at 4:44 am

    As far as they’re concerned, it’s time to cut our losses and move the Risk markers to a new, less predictable failure arena.

    Grenada 2, the sequel.

  4. 4.

    El Cid

    May 7, 2013 at 5:10 am

    I love the assumption that only if ‘we’ stay on in some 3rd world nation in which ‘we’ intervene, this will improve as opposed to worsening the situation.

  5. 5.

    sm*t cl*de

    May 7, 2013 at 6:28 am

    Instead, corruption at the highest levels seems to have only worsened.

    No-one could possibly have predicted this consequence of turning Afghan governance into a spoils system, putting the worst bunch of grifters into power, and giving them a money hose to keep themselves there.
    I don’t know why you just don’t pour the money straight into Swiss bank accounts and cut out the middle-men.

  6. 6.

    Suffern ACE

    May 7, 2013 at 7:13 am

    @sm*t cl*de: nah. Dubai is jus as good these days. A good chunk of that CIA money just goes into condos in Dubai where the elite will go when their state fails again.

  7. 7.

    Suffern ACE

    May 7, 2013 at 7:17 am

    I do give us credit though. When we say we won’t do nation building, we really mean it.

  8. 8.

    Anton Sirius

    May 7, 2013 at 7:21 am

    As far as they’re concerned, it’s time to cut our losses and move the Risk markers to a new, less predictable failure arena.

    Australia, or yur doin it rong.

  9. 9.

    Anton Sirius

    May 7, 2013 at 7:21 am

    Plus they’ve got all that gun control, so they’ll be easy to take over, right?

  10. 10.

    Suffern ACE

    May 7, 2013 at 7:58 am

    @Anton Sirius: don’t laugh. We have long been financing Tasmanian separatists to use when we play for the big island.

  11. 11.

    Samuel Knight

    May 7, 2013 at 8:23 am

    BTW Afganistan is actually the first time the Obama administration publicly announced they were suckers. Karzai blatantly stole the Afghan election when Obama first took office – so much so that international observers across the spectrum complained about it. And they pointed out his brother was a drug lord.

    But the administration went on a “surged” with more cash, etc. It was a joke and anyone watching it knew – heh this guy’s an easy mark.

  12. 12.

    Loviatar, Firebagger

    May 7, 2013 at 8:37 am

    I figured someone in the daylight crew would’ve posted this already, because, well…

    Anything that could remotely be considered criticism of our dear leader President Obama will not get an honest discussion on this site.

  13. 13.

    Mike in NC

    May 7, 2013 at 10:44 am

    In hindsight, the Bush Palace & Library should have been built in Kabul under the close supervision of warmonger John McCain.

  14. 14.

    gratuitous

    May 7, 2013 at 1:38 pm

    We need a *new* war! The old ones are all scuffed and dirty now, and nobody wants to play with them anymore.

    But a new war. Oh, a new war is all shiny, and it kind of winks at you from across the room. Think of all the “war correspondent” credentials that can be earned. Oh, a new war is just the thing. And this time it will be all different and glorious, and those DFHs won’t be quoting Kipling at us all the time. Tell e.e. cummings to shut up.

    Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease can we have a new war?

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