Afghanistan Is A Hot Mess

I should seriously stop reading The Economist:

“AFGHANISTAN is in a much better position now than it ever was before as a nation.” So said Richard Boucher, America’s assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, on Thursday August 2nd. If that were true, the meetings scheduled on August 4th and 5th between President George Bush and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai would be an uneventful affair—a matter of mutual congratulation on a hard job well-done. On his inaugural visit to Camp David, Mr Karzai might even find time for a bracing walk in the surrounding Maryland hills.

That would make a nice change from the heavily-fortified compound in Kabul where he spends most of his time cooped up.

Well isn’t that pithy. The thing is, despite the many horrible things going on in Afghanistan, it really is in a better state than it has been for decades. And why shouldn’t the Bush/Karzai meeting be high profile? I don’t understand their logic. Much like their incoherent screed against Kazakhstan, their discussion seems to lack context:

There are currently 35,500 of these troops, in addition to a smaller American-led counter-terrorism force. Indeed, as they have deployed across southern Afghanistan, including to many places where the Taliban’s rule had not previously been challenged, the conflict has intensified. In the three months to July 22nd, according to Human Rights Watch, America and its allies dropped at least 407 bombs on Afghanistan—more than four times the number dropped in Iraq over the same period.

Calling Sherlock Holmes. So when you move troops into hostile territory, they get into more battles? I certainly didn’t see that coming. And they totally miss the point about the 407 bombs—it isn’t that so many bombs have been dropped, but that the forces there have felt so many bombs needed to be dropped—an unfortunate consequence of trying to secure a big country with a paltry number of troops. As Péter Marton has excellently documented, this does indeed pose problems… just not the insurmountable ones The Economist makes them out to be. Also, does anyone else remember when the NATO/US Coalition was bragging about how it would have 45,000 troops in-country, not 35,000?

The consistent underinvestment in Afghanistan rankles me to no end.

In fact, it’s not worth quoting the rest of this crummy article. The Economist writers display a very shallow understanding of the forces at work in Afghanistan—neither willing to concede the very real progress that has been made, nor willing to really examine why the country is still deeply at risk. The Korean hostages are waved about as if they are evidence of anything other than their own stupidity (as one editorial in Eqtedar-e Milli asked, “why were Korean men and women traveling without any bodyguards and security from Kandahar to Ghazni province by bus?”). The very real interrelations between security, governance, and the opium trade aren’t mentioned at all—by their view, governance is the responsibility of Karzai but security and opium are outside his control—and improvements and challenges are just listed as if there mere presence were evidence of anything beyond the editors’ knowledge of a few news wires.

Afghanistan really does face serious challenges, and The Economist lists several of them. However, beyond writing an empty summary with no real point, they add nothing to the discussion—not even a real reason why the talks at Camp David should be considered crisis talks (which seems to be their main point). Yes, Pakistan is causing a big issue; yes drugs are a big issue; yes it’s true that Kabul doesn’t have much power and corruption is a big deal. But these things are better than a decade ago. And while we have not yet matched our promises, we are still making good progress. That The Economist sees all doom and gloom is understandable, if you have no real idea of what’s going on there. Perhaps they could start by writing their reports not from Delhi, but Kabul—with input from people who actually live there, and have some sort of insight (even if anecdotal) on how things are.

Update: By way of comparison, let’s take a look at Peter Bergen’s list of the Top Ten Mistakes the Bush administration has made in Afghanistan, and for fun compare it to the Afghanistan coverage here at Registan.net.

1. Letting Osama Escape Tora Bora: I began seriously blogging about Afghanistan after this happened, but this event has been mentioned numerous times, in related contexts.
2. Too Few Grunts: Above, and numerous places here, I’ve complained this is a chronic problem.
3. Hiring Warlords: while I don’t think it was necessarily a bad idea in isolation (i.e. it’s tough to find a local commander in 2001 who wasn’t a warlord of some sort), Bergen’s main complaint—that this undercut efforts to build a national militia—track with my analysis.
4. Iraq: uhh, yes.
5. Nickel and Diming: (i.e. paltry amounts of foreign aid) very much so. I am not alone in thinking so.
6. Nixing NATO: to an extent, I agree with him, though NATO countries have their own issues to get over as well.
7. Coddling Pakistan: oh yes, for quite some time.
8. Prioritizing Poppies: Grrr! Countless times, I agree.
9. Losing Hearts and Minds: quite.
10. Timetable: I think Bergen is falling for a narrative fallacy here, in that there isn’t much indication that it was specifically the announcement that prompted the resurgence, so much as they had over three years to regroup and switch tactics. But the broader point—poor public diplomacy by the Pentagon—closely tacks with our analysis here (and, it should be noted, by people who were actually there, in the south).

What was the point of this comparison? It wasn’t to say Bergen is saying nothing new (it’s actually nice to have a list like that in one place), nor is it to say that Mother Jones should be hiring me to write those sorts of articles (though I would certainly not turn down an offer). Rather, this was to demonstrate that you can construct realistic, sober accounts of what has gone wrong in Afghanistan without The Economist’s reliance on hyperbole. Their reporting has become lazy, and their child’s excuse for wit cannot cover up their steep dive in critical thinking skills. Surely, they can do better.