Afghanistan doesn’t have to be Obama’s Vietnam

Wednesday, 11th March 2009

Eric Ellis presents his seven-point plan to halt the country’s eight-year decline

Iraq seems, at last, yesterday’s war. Now the Forgotten War in Afghanistan, the one that’s been going on longer, has become — again — the Just War.

Barack Obama insists Australians do more of the heavy lifting against a resurgent Taleban, at the pointy end of the desert wastelands of the Pashtun south. But two centuries of foreign engagement in Afghanistan suggest that’s not an invitation for Kevin Rudd to accept — and the families of eight young Australians would clearly agree. From the 1842 massacre of Elphinstone’s army and the Soviet adventure of the 1980s, armchair strategists insist foreigners have no business in Afghanistan, that it’s a graveyard of lost causes and good intentions.

But should past disasters in Afghanistan be the measure for this conflict? And do we have the luxury of not trying to assuage this deleterious land? Or is Afghanistan irretrievable, and to be avoided at all costs?

Eight years and $30 billion after the US invasion that followed the 9/11 attacks on America, Afghanistan isn’t much different from the basket-case failed state abandoned by the Taleban. Here are seven points that might help save Afghanistan from becoming ‘Obama’s Vietnam’, and perhaps even ‘Rudd’s Vietnam’ too, and address some of the mistakes of the past eight years.

1: Get rid of President Hamid Karzai

The ‘Mayor of Kabul’ — his writ has never extended much beyond the capital — has been pretty much a disaster as president. Karzai’s leadership model seems to be to don a stately chapan, complement his salt-and-pepper stubble with a traditional karakul for his bald pate, then repeat by rote, ‘We must do more for education, we must provide electricity’ often enough for people to believe it has happened. True, there are now more Afghan kids in schools (not hard off a near-zero base from Taleban times), but lessons are conducted in classrooms Neanderthals might recognise. Karzai blames foreigners for his failures — an explosion of crime, corruption and poppy production — and he’s partly right. But it’s also a distraction from his inability to limit corrupt ministers and his grasping family, whose fiefs keep Afghans in rags.