General McCaffrey is a war criminal and pentagon propagandist. He was recently in Afghanistan where he met about zero Afghans but lots of military folks. He wrote a report (pdf) about his short trip.
Besides a lot of partisan fluff it includes some insight into the situation as McCaffrey learned them during various working lunches and dinneres:
Afghanistan is in misery. […] The Afghan government at provincial and district level is largely dysfunctional and corrupt. The security situation (2.8 million refugees); the economy (unemployment 40% and rising, extreme poverty 41%, acute food shortages, inflation 12% and rising, agriculture broken); the giant heroin/opium criminal enterprise ($4 billion and 800 metric tons of heroin); and Afghan governance are all likely to get worse in the coming 24 months.
Note the missing stats of the number of bombs dropped by the ‘allies’.
McCaffrey also remarks on an issue I mentioned in my piece about Haji Habibullah Jan – the critical lack of ‘Unity of Command’ in Afghanistan:
There is no unity of command in Afghanistan. A sensible coordination of all political and military elements of the
Afghan theater of operations does not exist. There is no single military headquarters tactically commanding all
US forces. All NATO military forces do not fully respond to the NATO ISAF Commander because of extensive
national operational restrictions and caveats. In theory, NATO ISAF Forces respond to the (US) SACEUR…but
US Forces in ISAF (half the total ISAF forces are US) respond to the US CENTCOM commander. However, US
Special Operations Forces respond to US SOCOM…..not (US) SACEUR or US CENTCOM. There is no
accepted Combined NATO-Afghan military headquarters. There is no clear political governance relationship
organizing the government of Afghanistan, the United Nations and its many Agencies, NATO and its political and
military presence, the 26 Afghan deployed allied nations, the hundreds of NGO’s, and private entities and
contractors. There is little formal dialog between the government and military of Pakistan and Afghanistan,
except that cobbled together by the US Forces in Regional Command East along the Pakistan frontier.
Such an alphabet soup of command acronyms will never be able to do anything but seed more chaos.
There is no common policy on Afghanistan among the ‘allies’. There is no one in lead, no single political concept or development strategy. While accusing its allies over ‘caveats’, the U.S. has the biggest military caveats over its troop. It will not subordinate them to a unified NATO command.
The other NATO countries will not subordinate their troops to U.S. command. Their voters do not like the U.S. ‘style’ of bomb, bomb, bomb counter-insurgency and do not want to get involved into the civil war between Pashtuns and Northern Alliance (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen) warlords or a big clash with Pakistan.
The solution in Afghanistan is not more troops and more partners but less. Ruling in Afghanistan has always been decentralized. In 2002 the occupation powers installed a centralized system under their chosen mayor of Kabul, Hamid Karzai. That immediately led to cronyism and big scale corruption.
McCaffrey and others now call for more Afghan troops to stand up. But how will Afghanistan ever be able to pay 200,000 soldiers plus 200,000 policemen? Unlike Iraq it does not have the economy to support so many security forces.
The Taliban destroyed a lot of the traditional tribal structures and their administrative, political and security functions. But the remains of these could probably be revived and integrated into something that resembles the traditional federal Afghan state. To do so would require ‘the west’ to admit lots of errors, change its ‘we know’ attitude and to dissemble the warlord hierarchies in Kabul.
That is unlikely to happen. Much more likely is a further descent into chaos and in the end a soviet like retreat of ‘western’ forces and another civil war in Afghanistan after which some authoritarian victor takes over the mess.