After years of hearing how the brother of Afghanistan's president, Ahmed Wali Karzai is knee deep in corruption and heroin and possibly impeding the success of the entire counter-insurgency enterprise, I started wondering how come he's still around.being the brother of the president isn't the guarantee of safety or prosperity that you might think it is. Ask Billy Carter or Roger Clinton.
Better still, ask Ngo Dinh Nhu. Nhu was the widely regarded as the vicious mastermind behind his brother Ngo Dinh Diem's unholy reign in South Vietnam during the early years of America's involvement in their war. When crunch time came, that relationship didn't stop Nhu and Diem from getting their heads blown off in a U.S-sponsored coup on November 1, 1963.
That history being what it is, I've long thought that Ahmed Karzai was either borm with a shamrock up his ass, or he has some friends in fairly high places. Even the dumbest of bastards don't walk around ruining American wars with impunity unless they have some pretty high-powered protection. Since all his brother has managed do in the last decade is steal an election, he doesn't count.
As we all learned from the New York Times on Tuesday, I have pretty good instincts.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.You don't say.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.
More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.
Essentially, the Agency is playing both sides against the middle in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the middle in Afghanistan happens to be the United States and NATO troops.
To understand where we are and why, some history is necessary.
When President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and CIA Director George Tenant decided to invade Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, they chose not to do so with very many actual Americans. Instead, US Special Forces and CIA paramilitary teams were sent in with giant sacks of money and promises of political power for any drug dealer or war criminal willing to battle the Taliban on their behalf. And in Afghanistan everybody is a drug dealer, a war criminal, or both.
Unfortunately, without a sufficent Western troop presence on the ground to manage the situation, Afghanistan has worked out about as well as you would expect a country run by drug dealers and war criminals to.
There are other problems with the "light footprint" strategy persued by the Bush and Obama administrations. Specifically, if you don't have a large number of kids from Kansas with guns on the ground, you can only attack a widespread insurgency through bombing. However, bombing runs a high risk of murdering a large number of civilians, which tends to create more insurgents.
What amazes me is that the CIA hired drug dealers and war criminals to run a country and they're shocked that it isn't working out very well. But unless you infuse massive numbers of troops, well beyond what General McChrystal is proposing or President Obama is willing to even consider, you need drug dealers and war criminals to maintain at least some semblence of order.
But you don't defeat an insurgency with drug dealers and war criminals. That's a good strategy for enlarging an insurgency. As things currently stand, the Afghan people get to choose between psychopaths who can bring order to the country and CIA rent-a-thugs who don't. There isn't a third option without a dramatic troop infusion. The "Biden Plan" is too retarded to even consider, since it's predicated almost entirely on bombing, which kills civilians and grows the Taliban even further.
The seeds of this mission's destruction were sown back in 2001, when the Bush administration decided that they needed people like Ahmed Karzai on the payroll. The West just can't be taken seriously by the Afghan people when we do things like that.
Because NATO generally, and the United States in particular, is never going to get serious about this, we are going to abandon Afghanistan again. The only question left is how many more people need to get needlessly killed before we do.
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