Linda Polman on "Afghaniscam": Is US "Aid" Making Things Worse?

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Linda Polman on "Afghaniscam": Is US "Aid" Making Things Worse?
Wednesday 22 September 2010
by: Robert Naiman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

It is frequently acknowledged that US policy in Afghanistan is "failing." But a sharper question is less frequently posed: are the actions of the US government making Afghans worse off than they would be if the US were doing nothing in Afghanistan?

If Afghans would be better off if the US were doing nothing in their country, that is not only a powerful indictment of current policy; it strongly suggests that the direction that US policy ought to move in is in the direction of doing much, much less in Afghanistan.

If current policy is not making Afghans better off than if the US were doing nothing, after nine years, two presidents, two secretaries of defense, different generals, different force levels, many revisions of policy, thousands dead and maimed and a huge expenditure of resources, we should be skeptical that any proposed policy which purports to be better than doing nothing is actually feasible. We should consider the possibility that our inability to do better than nothing in Afghanistan has deeper causes than presidents or generals or secretaries of defense, causes which are more difficult, perhaps impossible, to change.

While Afghans have little effective voice in our current policies, it is apparent that the interests of the Afghans do matter, even from the point of view of Washington, because if the majority of Afghans conclude that the actions of the US are worse for them than if the US did nothing, over time they can take actions which will compel the US to move in the direction of doing nothing in their country.

And if this is the likely future - that the majority of Afghans will take actions to compel the US to move in the direction of doing nothing in their country - then it is obviously in our interest to expedite this process, by taking domestic actions to compel the US government to move more decisively in the direction of doing much less, to minimize the human suffering and waste of resources caused by our current policy.