The Tumor At The Heart Of Our Afghan Campaign

[unhappycamper]

The Tumor At The Heart Of Our Afghan Campaign
Azeem Ibrahim
Research Fellow at Harvards Kennedy School and Institute of Social Policy Understanding
Posted: March 13, 2010 05:30 PM

There is a real danger that with each day that our brave troops spend fighting in the sands of Afghanistan, victory there becomes less and less worth winning.

That is a very serious charge, and I do not make it lightly. Like most people, I want to see a stable Afghanistan with strong institutions and real progress -- however slow -- toward the kind of democracy in which votes are chosen and not bought, and power changes hands according to preference not patronage.

But I just do not see that progress.

Worse, the Afghan government is moving in the opposite direction. The actions of President Hamid Karzai are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from a man set on undermining Afghanistan's democracy and institutions, and concentrating power in his own hands.

Let us go back to last year's elections. Despite being a step forward, they were still disappointing. Amid widespread fraud, Karzai opted not to campaign openly amongst the Aghan people, but rather to rely on backroom deals with regional strongmen (such as Mohammad Muhqeq, Rashid Dostum and Mohammad Fahim) to deliver their regions for him electorally. We know that the government bribed militants not to attack voters or polling stations, not because some intrepid investigative journalist got the scoop, but because the head of Afghanistan's Intelligence service, Amrullah Saleh, said so. That was, if you like, the policy.


Rest of article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/azeem-ibrahim/the-tumor-at-the-heart-of_b_497232.html