Daily Times Editorial May 1, 2013

Karzai’s bizarre response A report in the New York Times says President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan received wads of cash over the past decade from the CIA, ostensibly to buy influence amongst the troubled country’s warlords. President Karzai in his response has tried to put a positive gloss on this underhand largesse by arguing that the money was used for ‘good causes’ such as operation objectives (whatever that means), helping wounded and sick people and house rents (!) and ‘other objectives’. This bizarre explanation would be laughable if it were not so tragic as a reflection of what the Americans and their local Afghan allies have wrought in that unfortunate country. Allegations of corruption against the Karzai government have dogged its footsteps throughout the last 12 years of occupation. But now comes the revelation that some (if not most) of that corruption was fuelled by the US’s own actions in trundling wads of cash to Karzai without any accounting of how that money was spent or where. This will only increase suspicions that this ‘under the counter’ cash mostly was swallowed up by Karzai and his cronies. One US official has been quoted in this context as saying that the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the US itself. Admittedly, the nation building enterprise that Bush touted in Afghanistan and Iraq was inherently difficult for an occupying force, if not impossible. Nevertheless, instead of ‘building’ (infrastructure, industry, jobs), if the US was only interested in doling out cash in the hope of buying the loyalties of Karzai and the Afghan warlords, this was not only a pathetic idea, it clearly has not worked either. Afghanistan after 12 years under US/NATO occupation lies prostrate as an economy and a society. Then we hear unrealistic statements from US officials about what they are leaving behind after all the effort in money, lives, etc, expended in and on Afghanistan. If an authentic voice is to be heard, it is that of the outgoing French ambassador to Afghanistan: “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 really be independent.” What the corruption wrought by the US and the rake-off by its local satraps has done is to leave Afghanistan without the wherewithal to stand on its own feet once the US/NATO forces withdraw. Waiting in the wings are the Taliban, conceptually ready to take over once the almost inevitable collapse of the comprador regime in Kabul sets in without the level of external crutches on which it has been hobbling along. When the final word is written about Bush’s misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, no doubt history will record imperial hubris, catastrophic mismanagement of these occupied countries, and a legacy that should act as a salutary corrective to great power arrogance.