Failure™ Magazine

Seeds of Terror

How heroin is bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History

Obama has been criticized for not explaining why we’re still in Afghanistan. Is that a fair criticism?
A fair criticism is that the Obama Administration has failed to clearly define what it sees as a successful outcome in Afghanistan. Obama has said that failure in Afghanistan is not an option, but he hasn’t defined what success would be.

From reading news reports and speaking to a friend there, it seems that many Afghans are frustrated by the recent election and discouraged by this fig leaf of a democracy that the international community has hung on Afghanistan. Many parts of the country are run by warlords, and in parts of the south, the Taliban seems to be providing more effective governance than the government run by Hamid Karzai. That is seriously undercutting the confidence of the Afghan people in the Kabul regime.

What is amazing to me, having just moved back to the United States [after covering the conflict since 9/11] is that most people in this country seem to have forgotten about the attacks in New York and Washington. Americans seem to have forgotten that our nation set out to end the conditions that led to those attacks. In my opinion, walking away from Afghanistan—or scaling back—is not an option. Well, it’s an option, but it’s one that leaves the United States very vulnerable to another major terrorist attack.

Until the conditions that make Afghanistan and Pakistan havens for extremists and terror groups are removed, and until there is better local governance, the United States and its allies are going to continue to face a terrorist threat from the region.

The problem I have with the “counter-terrorism” strategy being advocated by some officials in Washington is that it’s the [same] strategy the United States and its NATO allies have pursued over the past seven years, and during that time the Taliban have gotten stronger and gained territory—both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The intelligence community claims that al Qaeda has been weakened, but the recent arrests in Colorado, New York and Texas indicate they are still plotting attacks in the U.S.

The strategy that General McChrystal is proposing is highly complex and will be immensely difficult to implement. But I worry that the “counter-terrorism” strategy is the national security equivalent of holding your thumb in the dyke. It’s not going to end the problem and eventually the flood gates will burst.

I also worry that the Obama Administration is going to be too sensitive to the public’s frustration with the war and isn’t going to resource it properly. Afghanistan is a conflict that has been massively under-resourced since the very beginning. That’s the reason Osama bin Laden escaped Tora Bora, that’s the reason the Taliban has been able to come back, and that’s the reason Pakistan is now facing a Taliban threat. There haven’t been enough foreign troops, there hasn’t been enough aid—or the money hasn’t been effectively spent—and there hasn’t been enough oversight. Billions of dollars have been squandered.

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