Pubdate: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 Source: Houston Chronicle (TX) Copyright: 2007 Globe Newspaper Company Contact: http://www.chron.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198 Note: Reprinted from The Boston Globe Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Afghanistan FAILED STATE BLOOMING The Bush administration's decision to conduct a review of security, governance and economic development in Afghanistan reflects an overdue recognition that, six years after the overthrow of the Taliban, the country remains dangerously unstable. With Taliban attacks on the rise and the opium poppy crop increasing, Afghanistan is on the way to becoming a failed state, a narco-state or both. The easy part of the policy review should be identifying past mistakes. An obvious error was the light military footprint that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to maintain after the Taliban were chased into Pakistan. The ratio of peacekeeping forces to population in Afghanistan is a tiny fraction of what it was in Bosnia or Kosovo. At the same time, notorious warlords were absorbed into the well-intentioned government of President Hamid Karzai. Their depredations, and the impunity they enjoyed, fostered resentment of the government. Inexcusably, the United States and its NATO allies failed to devote the time and resources needed for training professional police forces that would protect, and not prey upon, the civilian population. Making matters worse, the outside powers delivered less economic development funding than they promised, and that money was often spent in the wrong way. The aim should have been to create jobs at living wages for young Afghan men who would thus be encouraged to turn in their guns. They ought to have been put to work building badly needed roads, irrigation facilities, and other projects. Credit for those projects should have gone principally, even ostentatiously, to the Karzai government. But these things never happened, and now the Taliban have made a comeback in the south and east of the country. With Afghanistan now accounting for 93 percent of the world's opium supply, narco-corruption is seeping into every level of governance. And the Taliban are financing a large part of their operations from their cut of the heroin trade. A bad idea that the policy review should reject is the drug-war prescription for eradicating poppy crops with aerial spraying, as in Bolivia or Colombia. This is a sure formula for driving poor farmers into the arms of the Taliban. It would be cheaper and politically shrewder to buy the entire poppy crop for a few years, using it to supplement global supplies of morphine.... To shore up the Afghan government, the United States and NATO ... will have to dig in for the long haul. That is the price to be paid for the mistakes of the past. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake