A Day Late and A Dollar Short

Missed opportunities can be fatal and that's particularly true in warfare. Afghanistan may turn out to be a textbook example of this truism.

The west, particularly the U.S., has spent five years in Afghanistan but it has been mainly marking time. Immediately after driving the Taliban from Kabul and Kandahar we should have flooded the country with troops and aid, enough troops to provide real security to the countryside and enough aid to persuade the Afghan people that there was some good reason to support a new, central government.

Afghanistan was very much an open wound in 2001. It needed bandages and antibiotics so that it could heal. Instead we left the wound open and untreated and now we're fighting a losing battle against a once-avoidable infection.

When the Taliban were toppled, great promises of a better life were made to the Afghan people, promises that were far easier to fulfil then than they are today. These promises were important because they offered the means to create public acceptance for the Karzai government.

How do you respond to a promise that is broken? It may cause you to feel angry, distrustful, perhaps even hurt. We all know that much from experience. Why then would we expect the Afghan people to respond any differently after five years of waiting?

Afghanistan was something of a clean slate back in 2001. The Taliban were routed into the hill country bordering Pakistan. The Northern Alliance warlords were exhausted from years of fighting a civil war and hadn't yet cemented their control of the northern provinces. Opium production was at near record lows. The Pashtun south was wide open for the taking. Conditions were as good as they were ever going to get for nation-building. We let that golden opportunity slip through our fingers.

Where are we today? Karzai remains president but does not control much of his own country. The warlords have consolidated their control of the north. The Taliban has returned to contest the south. Reconstruction and infrastructure projects to bolster Karzai have faltered. The farmers have returned to opium production. Karzai's government bureaucracy has become riddled with corruption. The police are notoriously corrupt and alienate the peasants as does the army. The police and the army are known to have been well infiltrated by Taliban supporters. The army suffers from serious desertion and other problems. Now, why don't you add that all up and see how many successes we've achieved?

All of these setbacks that have resulted from doing near to nothing for five years have directly aided the Taliban insurgency. Theirs is a political war - a struggle for the hearts and minds of the Pashtun people. Every failure we've allowed to occur has been a hearts and minds issue, each and every one of them.

Just yesterday, Lt.-General Karl Eikenberry, commanding general of the combined forces command in Afghanistan, told delegates to the Asia Pacific summit that corruption and drug trafficking pose the greatest threat to coaltion efforts to "nurture a stable government." This general now thinks that the poppy-growing problem is big enough to warrant a strategy aimed at providing an alternative economy.

But once again, we're a day late and a dollar short. The opium economy has taken hold and flourished. Replacing it with some alternative economy is much harder today, perhaps even impossible. Even if this idea was attempted it would take considerable time in a situation in which too much time has already been lost.