The Afghan Bite

Afghanistan is poor, with a GDP somewhere above $29 billion and a population of about 30 million, it works out to about $1,000 per person per annum. With extensive mineral wealth – but an extremely dangerous effort required to lift the value out – and an incredible illegal economy in the opium trade (90% of the global supply), the skew of wealth makes the per capita for the average Afghani a whole lot less than $1,000/year.

“Corruption is identified as a problem within the Afghan government but Westerners often think of it in too simplistic of terms – ‘Corruption is corruption.’ Afghans distinguish between different types of corruption: administrative corruption (اداری فساد), corruption (فساد), and a low level bribe (بخشيش - baksheesh). A baksheesh is between 100-1000 Afs, and it's kind of like a tip….An example of administrative corruption is a governor paying the Ministry of Interior for a preferred post, or receiving payment from a party wanting X plots of government land...'Corruption' might be policemen taking a bribe to release a prisoner (the word for the actual bribe is رشوت - reshwat)… An example of baksheesh is an additional fee charged on the base price of an identity card (تذکيره - tazkira) application. Rather than asking for a ‘baksheesh’ outright, people might say, ‘Here is your tea (chai),’ when giving small denominations to a low level official. It’s like a pre-emptive tip, which helps grease the wheels and move things along.” Pashlings.blogspot.com, February 23, 2011.

But we’re not talking about baksheesh here! The rich get really richer, and corruption ripples through this society from micro-bribes at the local level to huge siphoning of drug money, paying a higher-up for a lucrative (bribe-infested) job or purloined values generated by moving aide projects and CIA contracts and money from their intended targets to the pockets and Swiss bank accounts of those at the top. The cronyism is simply staggering.

Conservative estimates from the United Nations speak of corruption displacing about $2.5 billion a year, but – wink wink – it does depend on how you define “corruption.” It is quite amusing – in a bad way – when President Hamid Karzai speaks of stamping out that graft-seeking element, when his own family is heavy on the illicit gravy trail, from hot heroin to just about every possible large-level bribe and major resource allocation available. How does Karzai put it? It’s our fault? “The bigger corruption is the corruption in contracts. The contracts are not issued by the Afghan government. The contracts are issued by the international community, mainly by the United States… Now whether this corruption in Afghanistan is an accident, a byproduct of the situation in the past 10 years or is it perpetrated also on purpose is today my main question.” Interview given on December 7^th. Did Karzai’s pockets jingle when he exited the interview?

So exactly how corrupt is this government we helped install? Average for a third world country? As bad as Nigeria? Check your email recently? Well, out of 180 countries surveyed by Transparency International, at least Afghanistan was not the most corrupt land on the planet. That dubious distinction falls to warlord-dominated Somalia. Nope, Afghanistan isn’t quite that bad… it came in at 179^th, so there’s still one notch to fall if Somali pirates and warlords ever opt for even the slightest improvement in stability.

And while our departure from Afghanistan will create battles between regional warlords and the nefarious Taliban, the least likely government to survive is the incumbency we still think of as the legitimate, democratically-elected (yeah, right!) Karzai regime… which, by the way, is termed out unless they change the constitution. No matter, enough of their wealth is in untraceable bank accounts, they’re not worried. So what if the Taliban will push this country back into the stone age, destroy any education of young girls and eradicate the 27% of women in the Afghan parliament (our own Congress is only 18% women).

We tried to impose our form of government on a multi-lingual nation steeped in tribalism, rather illiterate with absolutely no basis for such participatory governance. It didn’t work, and corruption killed even the slightest chance of success. So Afghans are willing to take austere and hated Taliban over the more hated mega-corrupt Karzai cronies, a government that literally controls the capital Kabul and the immediate environs… and nothing else. Oh, and they want the insensitive foreigners out.

How would you feel if the Chinese successfully invaded the United States, held their troops in place for over a decade, instilled their centralized “communism” as the benevolent form of government for our own good, and attempted to help us solve our big issues out of their desire to win our hearts and minds? Assume that they grappled with our deficit and helped stabilize our economy. They might be expecting gratitude, but all we would want from them is to get their butts out of our country. This is the United States… and not China. We do things our way…. 

Oh… you mean that place in Central Asia that we invaded actually doesn’t appreciate our presence? They don’t like the government we imposed, even though “it’s good for them”? They aren’t giving us their hearts and minds? They just want us out, even though life under the Taliban will be brutal? Ah, they’d rather have their own local brutes than foreign invaders who burn their holy books, go house-to-house to shoot women and children and pee on their dead? Noooo! And when exactly are we going to realize that folks really don’t like being invaded. “Liberating” is taking the bad guys out fast and then leaving even faster.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Americans really have to stop taking stupid-arrogance pills by the handful!