Funding the Afghan Taliban

The "private contributions from Persian Gulf states" largely come from the west, too, through our purchases of their major commodity. Not to mention our support for Pakistan's ISI, which is known to support to the Taliban. Funding two sides of a fight and putting troops on one side is not just stupid, it's sick-making.

Thanks for this set of articles. They sting, but then they should. General Petraeus, among others, knows that there is no military solution to this conflict. Hopefully the rest of us can get beyond our fear and ignorance and learn the lesson soon, and transmit that fact to our civilian leadership. Maybe then we can re-focus on the group that attacked the west on 9/11 - al Qaeda - and drew us into this bloody trap.

This highlights the need for projects which hire local unskilled Afghan labor at tasks like canal-clearing and basic dirt and gravel road improvement, which pays Afghan workers directly in cash at the end of the day, bypassing the local warlord. The problem is the Taliban "commanders" use the pay-offs to hire fighters, who would rather not fight but they need the money ("insurgent work" pays about $8 a day, and unemployment is 40% in Afghanistan). If young men were given an alternative they would take it, as insurgent work is rather dangerous. No one likes the Taliban. They cut off heads and hands, remember? Least effective of all are the kinds of projects the article refers to, the building of schools and bridges by foreign contractors which hires few if any Afghans. You need to eat before you need schools. These are also too easy to blow up.

Give Afghans jobs, and they won't fight. I have copied the Executive Summary of our Jobs for Afghans proposed initiative to create jobs throughout the country, which we researched while we were in Kabul this summer. This war has no military solution. It's all economic.

full program at http://jobsforafghans.org

Executive Summary to "Stabilizing Afghanistan Through a Cash-for-Work Initiative"
http://jobsforafghans.org/WhitePaper.pdf

Executive Summary

A recent ACBAR report states how a large proportion of foreign aid dollars in Afghanistan have been wasted. The Taliban insurgency, once almost defeated after the US-led invasion in 2001, is on the rise. Dissatisfied with the failed promises of alternative livelihoods, opium producers are turning back to growing more opium than wheat or other crops. In UN poverty indexes Afghanistan ranks 174th out of 178 countries, just ahead of four other countries in Sub -Saharan Africa, and actually dropping one place since the overthrow of the Taliban. A great majority of the population still lacks access to basic necessities of life such as food, shelter, and even minimal emergency health care.

We believe all this can be reversed by shifting our focus in the short run to unemployment, also known as “the mother of all problems” in Afghanistan, with appropriate plans for long run growth. With greater than 40% of the workforce unable to find jobs, social unrest is unavoidable. We are, therefore, proposing a bold and ambitious economic plan that would give low-skilled fighting-age men employment opportunities for $7 a day through a megascale cash-for-work program throughout the country. After discussing the strengths and potential weaknesses of such programs with many different players involved in the reconstruction, we conclude that it is only such an initiative which will bring short-term stability and pave the road for initiatives aimed at achieving long term growth and development. Without a foundation of social stability, no dynamic development driven purely by the free market can take place.

The 2009 World Bank Interim Strategy Note states:

"Despite the priority attached by the government to aid effectiveness, this has not yet translated into real progress in the way donors are doing business…Much of this assistance is delivered through large contracts with expatriate firms incurring costly security overheads. The resulting layers upon layers of subcontracting appear to many Afghans as a case of many hands legally taking a cut of funds before they reach target populations."

It is no surprise that the Taliban, although extremely unpopular with the Afghan people and once almost defeated after the US-led invasion in 2001, are re-emerging and gaining more support. Their comeback has a lot to do with the unfulfilled promises of the international community and their failed attempts to bring about stability and visible changes in the lives of ordinary Afghans.

This paper and the form of reconstruction projects it advocates – i.e. labor-intensive, easily supervised and managed undertakings which require a minimum of technical expertise and capital equipment - is a response to the problems highlighted in the ACBAR report. This response provides a theoretical framework putting forth the advantages and potential pitfalls of cash-for-work, which have already proven successful in parts of the country and around the world. We propose that tackling the 40% unemployment should be the number one priority in rebuilding war-torn Afghanistan. A recent report by Afghanistan’s Independent Department of Local Governance (IDLG) indicates that the majority of district governors in all 34 provinces of Afghanistan unanimously declared that “unemployment is the mother of all problems.”

Unemployment at such enormous levels give rise, obviously, to many other problems of utmost consequence. The World Bank 2009 Interim Strategy Note on Afghanistan points out that, at present, at least 35% of Afghans do not meet the daily minimum caloric intake requirement which is the threshold for malnutrition. This almost certainly affects children disproportionately.

History has no shortage of examples backing the presumption that programs which infuse cash and capital into a devastated economy work in the long run, most notable of which is the Marshall Plan. Foreign assistance consisted mostly of supplies, food, and wages administered by the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA,) signed into law by President Truman in 1948. The Marshall Plan was a phenomenal success, and laid the groundwork for dynamic economic growth in Europe and a stable economic partnership with the U.S.

Previously hostile Germany became a staunch political ally. In the political belief system prevalent in the West which emphasizes the free market’s ability to enable a people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps," the Marshall Plan was the “straps.” There was nothing organic about the impetus: most Europeans had nothing after the war, as do most Afghans now, and the help came from an external infusion of aid aimed at the poorest wage-earners, funded largely by the United States. It ceased after just four years, and Europe walked on its own. In prescribing the Marshall Plan in his famous speech at a Harvard Commencement in 1947, as hunger and violence increased across Europe and the communists made political gains, Secretary of State George Marshall remarked that “the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate.”

We believe we have taken long enough deliberating and it is time to act before the tides reverse, and we lose our strongest allies in Afghanistan to the Taliban, i.e. ordinary Afghan people.

PDF of full report "Stabilizing Afghanistan Through a Cash-for-Work Initiative" at
http://jobsforafghans.org/WhitePaper.pdf

A nation cannot fund a war against itself and expect victory in war. European heroin users fund the Taliban while European citizens fund their troops in Afghanistan. NATO may not like the complexities that this truth presents but they cannot win this war without facing this truth.

I doubt the NATO citizens understand this issue because facing this truth is uncomfortable for European political leaders.

European Commission respective governments consider narcotics abuse to be of health or social concern, not primarily activity of a criminal nature or national defense. The governments are inclined to settle for containing the Afghan narcotics problems or reducing them to ‘manageable’ levels.
One ranking European military officer summed up this attitude: "I don’t want my soldiers to die for the sake of a drug addict."

However, NATO soldiers are dying for European drug addicts. Heroin users are paying for Taliban ammunition and IEDs. This makes drug addiction a national security issue, for all NATO countries.

Afghanistan currently supplies some 93 per cent of the world’s opium. (Source UN)

Europe holds the second largest population of opiate users; The major populations of users in Western Europe are estimated to be in the United Kingdom (between 404-434,000 persons), Italy (305,000), France (171-205,000), Germany (76-161,000) and Spain (61-121,000). (Source UN)

The problem is political leaders order their soldiers to war but do not lead their nations to war. Political will is in short supply and silent capitulation seems to be the tactic domestically in dealing with the political realities of Afghan heroin. To the Taliban heroin is a weapon of war. The demand side is ignored.