An explicit policy to ignore corruption

It’s been a few days since I’ve written about Afghanistan. Since two people quoted Sarah Chayes I thought I had better go to the source. Chayes wrote in her personal blog (like I’m doing). She covered the fall of the Taliban in 2001 for NPR. She then stayed in Afghanistan for a decade and ran two non-profits. Then she worked for two commanders of the international troops, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Out of that came two books. From her blog post from 9 days ago:

Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face. I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did. For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable. Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line. I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for. And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules. Is that American democracy? Well…?

Chayes then discussed the extent to which Pakistan has nurtured and backed the Taliban, even doing market surveys to determine that “Taliban” had the best messaging to appear as a group of young religious students who were gentle and their only interest in government was to stop the extortion. Yet we insist Pakistan is an American ally. Then on to Hamid Karzai. The US chose him to lead Afghanistan after ousting the Taliban in 2001. A strange choice since he negotiated the Taliban’s entry into Afghanistan in 1994. And now he is a major member of the team negotiating for peace today. Chitown Kev, in his pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo:

Certainly the way it’s played out has been messy, chaotic, mortifying. Many armchair quarterbacks have the idea that the US could have evacuated everyone who had worked with us in advance of withdrawal. But as I and many other have argued that’s a basic misunderstanding of the situation. If you evacuate everyone who might be endangered by the fall of the government in advance, you are basically signing the regime’s death warrant. You are saying you don’t expect the regime to last and that the fall will come fast. That message is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yes, Marshall wrote, the Americans could have processed exit paperwork more quickly, but this type of exit was baked in to the US mission in Afghanistan. Steve Inskeep of NPR spoke to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in office under GW Bush when 9/11 happened, about when America could have exited Afghanistan. We could have left in 2002 when it seemed clear Osama Bin Laden was no longer in the country. Another chance came in 2005, but attention was diverted to Iraq. Obama tried the surge to end things, but the Afghan government was too corrupt and the local troops didn’t think it was worth the sacrifice. Armitage said the decision to get out is correct, but the execution has been a mess. He said:

Let me give you an example. The whole world had witnessed a conga line of grifters in the previous administration that paraded as Cabinet officers. Nobody knew better than our foreign friends what these folks were about. So that raised questions, first of all, about where the direction of the United States was. ... My preference would have been to just to take the end of the year, make an announcement - we're going to get out - and use all that time to process special immigration visas and other things. But the fact that even now, as I understand it, we're still to some extent trying to enforce some sort of bureaucracy on those leaving Afghanistan who are not American, it strikes me as insane. We ought to get them out and then sort them out after.

MimiStardust of the Kos community quoted a guy, name not given, who was featured in the Kansas City Star. Twice he served in Afghanistan as a Marine. He summarized the situation quite quickly:

“One: For 20 years, politicians, elites and D.C. military leaders lied to us about Afghanistan.” “Two: What happened last week was inevitable, and anyone saying differently is still lying to you.” “...when people ask me if we made the right call getting out of Afghanistan in 2021, I answer truthfully: Absolutely not. The right call was getting out in 2002. 2003.” “Elitist hacks are even blaming the American people for what happened this week. The same American people that they spent years lying to about Afghanistan. Are you kidding me?”

David Rothkopf tweeted about our messy exit from Afghanistan:

For those who say that what has happened in the last week will permanently damage America's standing in the world, a short list of reasons why, bad as it was, it won't even make the top 30 things that have really harmed our standing. 1. A coup against our government led by our president 2. Support for the coup from the entire Republican Party 3. A major political party (see above) dedicated to dismantling democracy in the United States 4. A president impeached for encouraging the coup 5. A president impeached for trying to blackmail a US ally 6. A president who bullied & insulted our allies for 4 years 7. A president and party who have actively promoted racism and ethno-nationalism ... 11. US having the highest COVID death total in the world 12. A president cozying up to dictators worldwide 13. A president corruptly profiting from the presidency 14. A president who was a serial sex offender 15. A president who is a serial tax cheat 16. A president who serially obstructed justice 17. A president who was, at least, the pawn of a foreign enemy who he catered to at the expense of US national security and that of our allies 18. A president surrounded by a long list of corrupt, indicted, convicted cronies ... 27. A president who violated int't law via rendition programs and the opening of the prison in Guantanamo 28. A president who illegally invaded Iraq without justification causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents ... We mismanaged an event in pursuit of doing the right thing. That is much better by any measure than doing the wrong thing efficiently. ... What is more, the admin responded quickly.

Stacy Mitchell, the co-director for the Institute for Local Self Reliance, tweeted about the bad deal cities and towns have been getting out of big box stores. These big companies promised huge tax revenues that enticed local governments. But underneath were two big costs: 1. They require expensive public services, mainly roads and police. 2. They cause the value and tax revenue of the town’s downtown to drop. A few years later the city’s finances would break even or perhaps be worse. A few years after that with the loss of downtown and the area’s overall decline the big box chains would contest their property valuations, which slashed the taxes they paid. The town would be even worse off. Vermont, which compelled towns to do the thorough analysis, has a lot of healthy small businesses.