Yon is still wrong
Well, yesterday it was Starbuck. Today it’s Mike Yon, his third time at the plate.
I feel like La Flama Blanca on the mound. And I’m bringing the heat!
(Editor: You act jackassed like Kenny Powers, too. Carl: You should see me in my Scream mask!)
This is the weak sauce Mike has been spilling lately: “The war in Afghanistan is turning around in our favor. After nearly five years of yelling at the top of my lungs that we are losing, it’s a relief to write these words with confidence.”
Go ahead. Read the whole thing. He published it here I think just to spite me.
Damned Yon.
*****
OK, you’re back! Let’s just be bold: Mike can’t say these heady things with any certainty and you shouldn’t believe him until he starts to offer something in our trade we call “proof.”
So far, the only empirical evidence Mike has ginned up for his optimism is a New York Times story quoting mostly unnamed U.S. and Afghan leaders that has become something of a joke amongst experts on the subject. I can’t figure out why it was written or if editors injected some of the silliness into the story, but Yon loves its optimism so I guess that’s all that counts.
Before he boarded a bird to go learn about the “rule of law” in a country without the ability to enforce any of them, Yon warned from Kabul that if the “Taliban come back, the music will stop, and we will have wasted hundred of billions of dollars, not to mention the lives and limbs.”
It’s time we broke it to our intrepid reporter: The various Taliban ARE back in Kabul. He probably has been stumbling past them for weeks without knowing it.
The guerrillas have been drawn to a capital that is awash with war spending and opium dollars. Today, 97 percent of Afghan GDP in the legitimate “overworld” depends on foreign aid. That’s catnip to the Karzai kleptocracy and insurgent militias, the latter because they can tax the projects or erect legitimate-looking front companies to catch the contracts from corrupt cronies.
The major Taliban militias in and around Kabul haven’t been sniffing just for the western aid dollars. They’ve been creeping back to the the capital since 2009 because it’s an important hub in the global opium trade. That’s created a nexus linking corrupt politicians, businessmen, criminal syndicates and the insurgent commands making deals together in the underworld.
This is what Yon doesn’t apparently see when he’s pondering the sublimity of U2 lyrics blaring over café speakers or photographing balloon merchants, donkey drivers and children, each snapshot another sign of boundless sunshine and game-changing optimism.
So I put it to you, gentle readers. Do you want to accept Yon’s version of Kabul? Or do you want me to tell you what those who speak the languages of Afghanistan and make their livings studying the political economies of war-torn nations, narcotics and the region have to say about the joint?
If you elect the former, stop reading now.
If you care to leaven your daily dose of Yon with contrary views from experts in the field, then keep reading!
*****
For the past year, I’ve been studying reports from the Afghanistan NGO Safety Organisation (ANSO), the Open Society Foundation, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Afghanistan Analysts Network, the United Nations (UNAMA, UNODC), the wonderful Citha D. Maass, World Bank, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and, most especially, the omnibus reports of the International Crisis Group in Kabul and Brussels.
If you’re sucking Yon’s optimism like helium and you need to come down from your zany high, just take a toke of this.
None of these scholars or institutions shares Yon’s heady optimism. Reading all of them, however, will help you piece together an admittedly murkier picture of the guerrilla war in Afghanistan: While the strife continues to be animated by a reaction to foreign occupation and aspects of retributive civil war, it’s shifting to that of a parasitical contest for dope markets, drug shipping routes, foreign aid moolah and resources chipped from the earth.
The U.S. and our ISAF allies surged south, but reports now indicate that the momentum of the (often fratricidal) insurgents shifted to the east and central regions. The three main insurgent militias of the Haqqani Network, Quetta Shura Taliban and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e-Islami have erected business fronts in the capital to work alongside their underworld dealings with corrupt officials and intensify terrorist attacks like the Haqqanis’ daring raid against the Intercontinental Hotel.
The jitney Michael takes about town, the money exchanger who converts his dollars, the vegetables on his table tithed through ushr and the Coke in his paw that arrived from Pakistan – all these goods and services likely are tied to one or more of the insurgencies, either directly or indirectly, as they move through an Afghan market regulated only by the taxes the Taliban place on the widgets to keep moving.
All this transpired inside what U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus called the expanding “Kabul security bubble” or what others fancifully nickname the “ring of steel” around the city. The lords of the ring are the Afghan security forces, so it’s perhaps more of a three-ring circus, as we saw during the recent Intercontinental Hotel slaughter.
In the recent International Crisis Group survey, for example, researchers concluded that the Quetta Shura “operate in 35 of the 62 districts in the seven provinces” around Kabul and that these “mini-shadow states operate as parallel governments, administering taxes, settling disputes and distributing power through the appointment of local military commanders.”
The insurgent raids in Kabul launched during the early 2010 campaign and the most recent “Badr” offensive arrived from these provinces, with some of the operations in the capital orchestrated from Taliban safe havens in Pakistan. Using a network of local mosques, the guerrillas’ goal is to capture the city psychologically, not physically.
The ideology of militant Islam hasn’t been removed just because a narco-terrorist cartel emerged in and around the capital. Nor have the Taliban’s political cadres stopped extending their tentacles throughout Kabul’s environs. But the nature of the war appears to be morphing into something even more unlikely to be mitigated by military might or diplomacy.
And according to ANSO’s most recent report, violence across Afghanistan has now crested over the peaks recorded in 2010. The rates of strife recorded in the southern, central and eastern provinces against soft targets of the various insurgent militias were most depressing.
Yon doesn’t have pictures of any of that, I guess.
Tags: Afghanistan, drugs, Even Starbuck says that Yon is wrong, La Flama Blanca, Michael Yon, Yon is still wrong
