Needlenose

jobless recoveryThe Los Angeles Times has an article this morning about our confused priorities in rebuilding Afghanistan:

“Our biggest fear is that this opportunity will be lost because pressures for the appearance of success, particularly internationally, will lead to money being spent in the wrong way, on the wrong kinds of investments,” said Paul O’Brien, advocacy coordinator for the U.S.-based aid agency CARE International. “What we need is long-term, sustainable benefit for Afghan people so that we help to create an environment where they can rebuild their country.”

The U.S. has paid $60 million to build schools, provide textbooks and train teachers. However, Afghanistan’s cash-poor government is responsible for paying the teachers — and it doesn’t have the money. Teachers are quitting and schools closing because warlords who helped the U.S. military during the 2001 war — and received money and weapons in return — are resisting Karzai’s order to hand over an estimated $800 million in annual tax revenue.

“We have to worry about our priorities if we can’t find enough money to pay teachers $100 a month,” said Paul Barker, CARE’s director in Afghanistan.

In March, Washington agreed to give $35 million in financing and political risk insurance to Hyatt International to construct a five-star hotel where the legions of entrepreneurs and aid officials can stay when they visit Kabul.

Yet the city’s estimated 3 million people live without such basics as a sewer system, and there is no plan to build one.

Actually, this sounds unnervingly like the Bush administration’s game plan for America, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile, the New York Times chimes in with a report on the natural corollary of our failure to rebuild the country — the resurgence of the Taliban:

As the weak central government has failed to extend its writ in isolated parts of the south, Western diplomats say, the Taliban are trying to fill the vacuum. In many districts, the only evidence of government authority is a district leader protected by a small group of poorly paid and ill-equipped police. Residents complain of lawlessness and say that while they do not support the Taliban, they miss the strict law and order they enforced.

Some of the stepped-up Taliban campaign has involved basic propaganda. “Night letters” left in villages and cities play on the lack of aid and a sense among Pashtuns that they are not adequately represented in the new national government. Residents are told that the United States is simply interested in occupying Muslim countries, not in aiding them.

. . . Afghans who cooperate with the government or the United States are being killed. Two police chiefs, two pro-government imams, and more than 30 policemen were killed in the south and east in July and August, Afghan officials said.

An attempt to assassinate the governor of Helmand Province was thwarted in early August.

. . . “They have a sophisticated strategy of going after local people,” a senior Western diplomat said. “The mantra they use is that the Americans and the international community will leave someday, and we will come back.”

I guess the locals in Iraq would find this approach all too familiar. But don’t worry, the U.S. thinks they have a solution:

Colonel Donohue, as well as Afghan officials, said the struggle in the south would be won by aid workers, not soldiers. The problem is stabilizing the area so they can create jobs and gain popular support.

“Those are the guys who are going to win it for us,” he said, referring to aid workers. “That’s how we’re really going to defeat the root causes.“

Are you starting to buy that? If so, go back to the top of the post and read the Los Angeles Times article again. That should crush any remaining hope, I think.