John Cook
Lieutenant Colonel (LTC)
These are President George Bush’s words, not mine. I wish they were mine. They are from his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention in 2004. The point he was making concerned the sorry state of public education resulting in a high rate of failure. He believed American educators had set the achievement bar too low due to the mistaken belief that some students simply could not perform.
The same can be said about our present situation in Afghanistan. We have set the performance bar for the government here very low and the expectations are what one would expect which are very low indeed. As a result, we are seeing a self-fulfilling prophecy-if you are will to settle for so little success, that is precisely what you will see.
At the recently concluded London Conference, the international community pledged additional support to the Afghan government. The Afghan National Police will grow to 109,000 this year and the Afghan Army will grow to 134,000. Added together, this will require Afghanistan to add some 30,000 additional police and soldiers to the nation’s defense forces. For a nation of 33 million, on a war footing, struggling for survival, this should be relatively easy, considering that the international community is paying the total bill for salary, training, equipment, everything.
If you believe this you would be wrong because Afghanistan is decidedly not on a war footing. After eight years of war, the Afghan government has not gotten around to passing any legislation that remotely resembles a draft or compulsory national service. As a result, recruiters must scour the countryside looking for new recruits. This is not an easy job in Afghanistan and recruiting 30,000 in a single year is a tall order.
Even assuming a very good year and the recruiters actually recruit 30,000, only about half this number will be added to the force; 20% will fail drug testing, another 10% will not show up at the training centers and another 20% will simply walk away after drawing a couple of paychecks. The abnormally high attrition rate is due, in large part, to the fact that there is no retribution for leaving the force. No Afghan is ever punished for desertion. So to add 30,000 to the force, the recruiters need to actually recruit 45,000 and this will be a bridge too far in a single year. However, none of these troubling details were fully examined during the London Conference.
To be fair, not everything could have been discussed at London. The diplomats there had important business to discuss such as making overtures to the Taliban to come down from the Hindu Kush and join the Afghan government. President Karzai offered the Taliban jobs and money to lure them out of the mountains. He called these offers an incentive; others called them a bribe. In any event, the Taliban were having none of it, waiting, no doubt, for a better offer. As a result, there were no great expectations for resolutions to be found for every problem or for everything to be covered in great detail. A prime example of issues not resolved at the London Conference is the poppy problem. Right now down south, in Kandahar, Helmand and Nimroz provinces, a half a million acres of poppies are sprouting in the fields. They will be ready for harvest in late May and it looks like another bumper crop in the making.
Without question, the poppies represent Afghanistan’s major export. The country produces 97% of the world’s supply of opium. The poppies are the single biggest source of corruption in the country and represent some 90% of the Taliban’s funding. They could easily be eradicated by aerial spraying, thereby ending the cancer of corruption on Afghanistan and dealing the Taliban a crippling blow at the same time. However, aerial eradication is not even being discussed. Rather, the United States is following a policy of interdiction rather than eradication, opting to somehow intercept the processed drugs along an endless number of smuggling routes, rather than destroying them at the source, in the fields. Such a policy is the intellectual equivalent of attempting to destroy a missile in flight rather than blow it up on the launch pad.
To the surprise of no one, President Karzai agrees wholeheartedly with this strategy. He claims that he has encouraged the poppy farmers to give up growing poppies and grow legal crops instead. However, he says the farmers will not listen to his pleas and there is nothing he can do. The fact that growing poppies is illegal under the Afghan constitution is conveniently forgotten whenever this issue is discussed. In fact, the Afghan constitution elaborates in detail as to the illegality of the drug trade. So the American policy is to engage in interdiction and the Afghan government’s policy is to somehow convince the poppy growers to voluntarily stop growing the most rewarding crop known to man, a crop that can bring the farmer a tenfold greater profit than wheat or cotton. As long as the poppies are here, there will be money for the terrorists – terrorists that threaten the lives of our soldiers and our nation. This fact should be obvious to all parties but it is not. Maybe Keats had it right when he wrote, “Autumn slumber – all drowsed with the fume of the poppies.”
No doubt, the 30,000 man surge pledged by President Obama will help in the war on terror. Neither can there be any doubt about the performance of our magnificent military on the ground here, clearing areas that were once Taliban strongholds and showing the Afghan security forces how to both fight the enemy and win the hearts and minds of the population. These points were never open to debate. However, as America begins the ninth year of combat in Afghanistan, no one knows for certain how it will all end. The questionable commitment of the Afghan government, coupled with the American strategy of demanding so little from it, is troubling. At some point, the Afghans are going to have to want to succeed at least as much as America wants them to succeed. Unfortunately, we have not yet reached this point nor can we see it anywhere on the horizon. In the meantime, this year’s crop of poppies is doing quite well in the south and the soft bigotry of low expectations is alive and well in Afghanistan and the great halls of the coalition forces.
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