Friday, January 2

The West WILL lose in Afghanistan because of corruption

There are quite a lot of military ways and reasons that it will be difficult to win in Afghanistan, ranging from lack of helicopters to lack of security and and and. But on thing which will make it impossible to do anything in Afghanistan, to make it into a normal country, will be corruption. That is why countries fail and Afghanistan, based upon this story, will again go back to the medieval hell-hole that it was before. Corruption decays governments and civil institutions, there is no trust and it creates havoc within all efforts to make sense out of the country reconstruction mechanisms. I quote some bits:

When it comes to governing this violent, fractious land, everything, it seems, has its price. Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000. Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban. Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

As with fish, the rot starts at the top. President Karzai is to blame. And actually, the blaming starts with the American and British advisors who are actually propping this corrupt regime up. But then, nobody ever said that the American President and British Prime Minister were smart, both of them are drooling morons. So what do they do to help Afghanistan be good? They put in troops, rather than kick out the corrupt bastards who are sucking the Afghans and my taxpayer dollars.

Many Afghans, including Mr. Ghani, the former finance minister, place responsibility for the collapse of the state on Mr. Karzai, who, they say, has failed repeatedly to confront the powerful figures who are behind much of the corruption. In his stint as finance minister, Mr. Ghani said, two moments crystallized his disgust and finally prompted him to quit.

The first, Mr. Ghani said, was his attempt to impose order on Kabul’s chaotic system of private property rights. The Afghan government had accumulated vast amounts of land during the period of Communist rule in the 1970s and 1980s. And since 2001, the government has given much of it away — often, Mr. Ghani said, to shady developers at extremely low prices.

The fact that the Afghans are ungovernable and many time medieval is not in doubt, but how does that excuse Bush and Brown from being so stupid in propping up a corrupt government with the lives of our countrymen? The blame falls on these 2 venal cowardly leaders. Will the new leaders of our country do something about it?

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