Rife corruption allows rag-tag Taliban to win

Amin Saikal
July 10, 2008

Australia has lost a sixth soldier in Afghanistan, adding to the human and material cost of its involvement in the country. This comes hot on the heels of a huge suicide bombing that blasted the Indian embassy in Kabul on  Monday, resulting in an appalling loss of many innocent lives.

All this shows that after nearly seven years of costly efforts to stabilise and rebuild Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai's Government  and its international supporters have not been able to secure either the Afghan capital or many other parts of the country, particularly in the south and east along the border with Pakistan. The Afghan authorities have again pointed a finger at the Taliban and their Pakistani backers as the culprits. There is no question that these forces, which are also opposed to India's involvement in Afghanistan, bear much of responsibility for Afghanistan's woes,  but this tells only part of the story.

The other side of the story is that Karzai presides over a corrupt and dysfunctional system of governance, with a very limited authority over the country. His Government is entirely dependent on the support provided by the NATO-led International Security fhAssistance Force (ISAF) and the US-led coalition forces,  yet there has been little co-ordination between these forces and the Government's security apparatus.

The Afghan National Army is now claimed to be almost  70,000 strong, but it is still well short of the capacity to be a frontline fighting force. The ranks of the army, and for that matter the Karzai fhAdministration, are infiltrated by various opposition groups, most importantly the Taliban and its allies, more specifically  Hezbi Islami, the Islamic Party  of  the former maverick Mujahideen leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

In the case of the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy, the perpetrators used a truck full of explosives. This meant they had managed to get a large amount of explosives into the fortified city of  Kabul and into one of its most securely guarded central areas. They could not have done this without sufficient help from inside, as was the case with the Taliban's previous daring operations at Kabul's Serena Hotel and Ghazi Stadium, and at Kandahar prison. This is a very humbling experience for the Karzai Government and its foreign backers.

Undeniably, the Taliban has  sanctuaries in Pakistan and receives a considerable amount of support from the country.  The Pakistani  president, Pervez  Musharraf, has acknowledged as much. However,  it should be noted that the Taliban has never been, nor will ever be, a  major  force:  it is a militia composed of mostly poorly trained, clothed and equipped men. It has neither a strong system of command and control, nor any significant power behind it, as was the case with US backing for the Mujahideen in resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Yet it is astonishing that such a force has been able to keep the Afghan and NATO forces at bay and humiliate them time after time.  The Taliban's strength lies very much in the Government's weaknesses  and the inappropriate strategy pursued by the US and its allies in dealing with the problem.

In addition, the Government has no culturally relevant ideology of state building to counter the Taliban's reliance on Islam as a source of inspiration and salvation, an idea with which the Afghans have traditionally been imbued.

Combined with the slow pace of reconstruction, this has generated a massive political and security vacuum that the Taliban has skilfully exploited to expand its support networks inside Afghanistan. The Government is now distrusted not only by many in the international community, who heavily criticised it for its inefficiency and ineffectiveness during the donors' conference in Paris last month, but also by many  Afghans, who have experienced no great improvement in their living conditions in the post-Taliban period.

Given this state of affairs, Karzai and his foreign allies will not be in a position to do much against the Taliban and its supporters unless they work on three main objectives simultaneously. One is to address their political and strategic vulnerabilities; another is to widen and speed up reconstruction. A third is to re-establish a stable Afghan-Pakistan border by pressuring Pakistan  to halt all support for the Taliban.

If Australia wants to make a meaningful contribution to stabilising and rebuilding Afghanistan, it needs to focus its policies on these issues and pressure its allies to do the same. Otherwise, the international community is confronted with a conflict that could last for decades and may prove to be as costly as that of Iraq without, at the end, being able to transform  Afghanistan into a self-sustaining viable state.

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