Afghanistan: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
With all the bad news coming out of Iraq, the U.S. effort in Afghanistan is not looking all that bad these days. For one thing, the U.S. troop presence there is surprisingly popular. More than 80 percent of Afghans want American troops to stay in their country, according to recent State Department polls. The economy is surprisingly healthy and reconstruction projects are moving ahead in parts of the country. The situation obviously is far from rosy: The Afghan government remains alarmingly weak, the Taliban is gaining ground, and suicide bombings have risen sharply.
In an effort to build momentum in Afghanistan, the Bush administration has dispatched some additional American soldiers and is proposing a major boost in aid (although the request has been stalled with the fight over Iraq war funding). The extra help will be very welcome. When the White House was preparing its request for supplemental war funding last fall, it asked the State Department to calculate how much the United States has spent training and equipping the Afghan police and military and on reconstruction aid. Foggy Bottom reported that nearly $13 billion had been spent over five years. President Bush and his aides wondered if the State Department had miscalculatedbecause they thought the number would be significantly higher. The White House asked State to double-check its calculations, but the number was correct (today, the figure has grown to over $15 billion). The episode helped persuade Bush to ask for nearly $12 billion in additional reconstruction and security aid for the next 18 months.
A look at what's going right, and what's not, these days:
The Good
Afghanistan's economy might have started from a very low point, but it has been, by some measures, the fastest growing economy in South Asia, averaging a growth rate of nearly 14 percent since 2002. Inflation has remained relatively low and foreign companies are beginning to return. In the health sector, a recent household survey by Johns Hopkins University found that infant mortality is declining—some 40,000 fewer infants are dying each year than during Taliban rule. Nearly a third of pregnant women now receive some form of medical care, up from 5 percent before 2001.
Reconstruction is uneven, but projects do not have the same degree of security constraints as do their counterparts in Iraq. On many projects in Iraq, as much as 80 cents of each dollar spent on reconstruction goes toward overhead and security. In Afghanistan's most dangerous province, that figure is 28 cents. Elsewhere in the country, reconstruction aid dollars can go even further. U.S. officials are also encouraged by the high level of support for the U.S. presence, which has remained steady for several years. "It reflects the view that they're fine as long as the Americans are here," says one U.S. official. "But they do not feel the Americans will be here long enough to correct all the problems."
The Bad
U.S. military operations in Afghanistan continue to draw protests amid accusations of their causing civilian casualties. In the latest incident on Wednesday, Afghan officials claimed that U.S. airstrikes targeting Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan killed at least 21 civilians. U.S. officials could not confirm the account, but the uproar comes one day after the U.S. apologized for a previous incident and paid compensation to the families of 19 people who were killed by U.S. fire after a suicide bombing in March. The upper house of Afghan's parliament passed a bill Tuesday calling on the U.S. military and NATO to coordinate all offensive actions with the Afghan government.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government also remains very weak, and he still cannot exert much control in vast stretches of Afghanistan. "The penetration of the Afghan government throughout the country has been slow," says one U.S. official. In many areas, Taliban elements have moved in to fill the gaps. Opium cultivation has reached record levels and Afghanistan now accounts for more than 90 percent of the world's supply. U.S. officials have been focusing their counterdrug operations on a few provinces, leaving some of the biggest production areas for later.
The Ugly
The Taliban is in the midst of perhaps its strongest spring offensive since U.S. forces ousted the regime in late 2001. A recent United Nations report described an "insurgency emboldened by their strategic successes, rather than disheartened by their tactical failures." Even worse, the report found that the Taliban's leadership structures "remained intact."Insurgent violence in January was more than double the levels of a year ago. Suicide bombings rose throughout 2006 as well. Coalition deaths are also running higher-51 soldiers in the first four months of this year versus 36 in the same 2006 period.
Chaos in the tribal areas of Pakistan is only fueling the Taliban's resurgence. Overhead imagery from several months ago of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan illustrates how severe the problem is. U.S. spy cameras picked up images of a long column of more than 100 people being led across the border into Afghanistan. The men, clad in rags and wearing plastic bags on their feet instead of shoes, were being led by a small group of crack Taliban fighters. In an effort to avoid detection, the double-file column of men was stretched out over nearly a mile. U.S. officials believe these were a new batch of recruits for the Taliban. "It was clear that this was the fodder for the suicide bombs," says one U.S. official.