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It was a make or break year for the international adventure in Afghanistan, and as 2009 limps into history the leaders of the world’s great powers are stumbling through more broken crockery than you’d find at a Greek wedding.
But only Kabul's crooks and the Taliban are celebrating.
By rights, things should have turned out differently. Even the least capable statesmen and women of the U.S.-led coalition realized by this time last year that their disjointed strategies were failing.
Yet instead of taking action to avert disaster, our illustrious suits cloaked themselves in denial and hoped for the best.
In Kabul, 2009 ends with the Western-crafted Kabul regime virtually putting its corruption on parade. Hamid Karzai has given the cold shoulder to concerns about his ballot-rigged re-election as President by appointing a cabinet that promises more graft, less achievement and greater despair for the Afghan people – the public he was sworn to serve, but whose welfare he betrays.
The Taliban, having blasted the core of the United Nations’ work force out of Afghanistan, now brazenly taunts Washington from their safe-havens in Pakistan. Meanwhile Pakistan’s military adds insult to injury by refusing to turn over to their American allies the terrorists holding a U.S. soldier, Bowe Bergdahl, as their hostage.
While these headlines hurt, it’s the numbers, the statistics of failure, that lay bare the West’s disgrace. Even Bernie Madoff would wonder how so much cash could vanish so completely, with so few questions asked.
The United States military juggernaut has squandered more than $230 billion in Afghanistan since 2001, a figure the Congressional Research Office says will balloon to $300 billion next year.
European nations have poured in at least nine billion Euros, while the cost of Canada’s mission will likely top $18 billion by 2011. And the United Nations? Add two billion more - each year.
What’s it bought, this avalanche of money?
The U.N.’s World Food Program estimates that nearly one third of Afghanistan’s population, 7.4 million people, remain unable to get enough food. A further eight million Afghans are on the borderline of food insecurity.
UNICEF says that fully 70% of the population, 22 million people, are living in poverty, with four in ten children under the age of three underweight. Among the under-fives, 54% suffer from stunted growth.
Taken together, Afghanistan’s security and welfare indexes constitute an indictment against the country’s self-styled foreign friends, a damning mass of hard evidence that arguably displaces the Soviet Union as the most ruinous outside influence during the past 32 years of war.
Yes, the Soviets were cruel invaders. But our nations were meant to be the white knights of the saga, riding to Southwest Asia’s rescue - and our own, versus al Qaeda - in the aftermath of 9/11.
Instead, the New Year confronts us with an ugly truth. We have intensified the turmoil the Soviets left behind.
The incompetence and duplicity that led us to this dark juncture is flourishing in Kabul today, because Karzai’s crime ring is entirely a creation of the U.S.-led coalition.
We don’t need a crystal ball to see where the war is heading in 2010. Outflanked by incursions from Pakistan, and compromised in the rear by an illegitimate client regime, the West will squander more money and lives for diminishing returns.
We’ll continue to protest our good intentions, but most Afghans no longer believe the sweet words of their foreign friends.
The evidence says we just don’t give a damn, which only encourages the Taliban and al Qaeda to carry on killing.
