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After years of deception and denial, NATO leaders gathering for the alliance’s 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg and Kehl are facing a moment of truth about two of their greatest failures in Afghanistan.
First, the Pakistan military’s continuing support for the Afghan Taliban. About this, the West’s politicians and generals are finally coming clean, even as they struggle to devise a response that is woefully overdue.
On a second weak flank - preparing the Afghan National Army to go it alone, enabling the U.S. and its allies to quit the battlefield - NATO leaders continue to deceive their publics, and themselves.
The Taliban’s claim of responsibility for Thursday’s suicide attack on Kandahar’s provincial council underscores the West’s impotence against the guerrillas’ command and control structure.
Attacks such as Thursday’s are ordered, financed and equipped by Mullah Omar’s leadership council, based scarcely two hours’ drive south of Kandahar in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
Omar’s shura is intertwined with elements of Pakistan’s military, so much so that the U.S. has refrained from unleashing the C.I.A.'s drones against its leaders, in contrast to recent U.S. attacks on other Taliban and al Qaeda figures based in tribal areas further to the north and east.
President Obama has spoken indirectly about the Pakistani military’s schizophrenic stance on the Taliban. But in his recent Afghan policy statement, Obama stopped short of intoning the acronym that sums up the paradox: I.S.I.
Until he and his fellow NATO leaders shake off that timidity, it seems unlikely that Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence agency will see any real percentage in backing away from their Afghan client army.
Equally bleak are the prospects for the Afghanistan National Army, the Western-backed force intended to provide NATO with its exit strategy.
As they’ve done since the inception of the U.S.-led effort to train and equip the ANA, Western officials routinely overstate the force’s size and capability (for further background, see “Corruption and Cover Ups” posted Nov. 14, 2007 on page 7 of Recent Stories.)
At this week’s meeting in The Hague, world powers were content to parrot the Karzai regime’s claim of 86,000 troops currently in arms. The U.S. general who runs the training program, Richard Formica, gave Congress a figure of 90,000.
The true number is far smaller, according to some coalition officers on the ground in Afghanistan. “We’ve not seen anything that would lead us to believe there’s more than 40,000,” one trainer tells skyreporter. “And to call all of them combat ready would be just fooling ourselves.”
Worse, the U.S. and its NATO allies have been content to leave the ANA under the command of one of Hamid Karzai’s least capable ministers, Rahim Wardak. According to seasoned members of Kabul’s diplomatic corps, the defence minister is the hardest-drinking member of Karzai’s cabinet. Meantime, Wardak’s son, Hamed, has become the poster-boy of the regime’s outrageous nepotism.
Wardak boasts on his website, www.nclholdings.com, that in just two years, 2004-2005, he “generated $44 million in design-build contracts in Afghanistan through his business development efforts with USAID and the Department of Defense.”
He continues to exploit his Washington connections, gained under the Bush administration, and claims as “clients” the Pentagon, the State Department, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Trade Development Agency.
For all of its waste and drift, the ANA project is facing harsh criticism in Washington. Last June, the Government Accountability Office slammed the Pentagon for lacking “a solid plan to create a self-sustaining security force in Afghanistan” - and this after sinking 16 billion U.S. tax dollars in the army and police programs.
Afghan lawmakers, too, lament the costly failure. Members of both the upper and lower houses of parliament tell skyreporter that they plan to back calls for investigations of the regime’s inside operators and cronies.
Further to skyreporter’s March 7th entry, “Afghan War Profiteers”, presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani has provided further information to skyreporter, via email through an intermediary.
The former finance minister writes: “I have never had one on one meeting with Mahmood Karzai during or after my tenure of office.”
Regarding Hamed Wardak’s statement on his nclholdings.com website’s “Executive Management” page, that “In 2003-2203, he was the Afghan Finance Minister’s Private Envoy to the United States,” Dr. Ghani writes: “Hamid Wardak was not my “special” ambassador or advisor during MOF.”
“I distanced myself categorically from Hamid and did not meet with him during any of my trips to DC. I have never had any dealings with him or his companies in any capacity. His security companies have never provided me any assistance…”
Coming soon to skyreporter.com: how Kabul politics is shaking up Washington D.C.’s circle of Afghan-American business and governance hawks.
