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Stardate 20011209.2218 (On Screen): Nell writes to me as follows:

Winter has begun in Afghanistan. Infighting, looting, robbery, and other security breakdowns in areas under the 'control' of non-Taliban warlords have made it very difficult to distribute food to people who depend on it. In some areas, aid agencies have had to pull staff out again, making distribution impossible. [This is based on news items of the last six to ten days from BBC, the Independent, Toronto Globe and Mail, Washington Post, and others.]

What is your proposal for bringing enough stability to the north and west of the country to allow aid to get where it's needed? You frown on international peacekeepers because they'd undermine Afghans' sense of ownership of the new government. You might be interested to know that Christian Aid, an organization whose statements usually arouse your suspicions, supported this position in a Nov 30 article on their website.

However, your argument for 'ownership' would be more convincing if you gave any sign you believed it yourself. After stating the case well:

much of the strategy that the US has adopted in this war has been oriented around making use of local forces so that when the war was over they'd say "We did it ourselves" and thus have a strong commitment to whatever government was formed afterwards.... In terms of lending stability to the new government and letting it gain momentum, it would be much better to continue the policy of using local forces as much as possible. Otherwise it may come to be viewed as a western puppet...

You go on in a nearby post to spell out clearly that the local forces *didn't do it themselves, and that they *are puppets:

all the warlords will get told, "Play along and the goodies will flow. Become disruptive and we'll shut off the spigot." And as this process continues, these warlords will have more and more stake in keeping peace and in cooperating so as to keep the flow of foreign aid coming....

US bombs won this war. US dollars can win this peace.

What alternatives do you see for securing routes for food delivery, beyond particularly skillful combinations of threats and bribery on the part of U.S. officials?

I began to answer her by email and then decided it would make a good post. I don't think that my position is contradictory. The issue here is not the reality of the situation but rather how it is viewed by the Afghans. For example, as I mentioned part of why the new government has legitimacy is because of the view by the Afghans that "we did it ourselves" -- that it was Afghans, with a bit of help from the Americans, who won the war against the Taliban. In fact, it's the exact opposite. The Northern Alliance were cornered and weak and spent years on the defensive; then we showed up, started bombing and lending them other kinds of aid, and within a month the Taliban were on the run and within two months were defeated. It's obvious on the face of it that it was US air power which primarily won this war. Still, that's not how it's going to viewed in Afghanistan, and that's important.

Use of the warlords as a conduit for aid doesn't discredit them in the eyes of the people they rule. On the contrary, it would strengthen them as long as the political sway were used subtly; they would not be viewed as having sold their souls to the west, but rather as having gotten those supplies for their people from the west. They're interfaces, but it's important which direction they're viewed as looking (i.e. towards the west, on the side of Afghanistan, rather than towards Afghanistan, on the side of the West). It plays into the standard use of patronage by strongmen in Afghanistan to keep the loyalty of those underneath them.

For that to work, it does mean that we won't be making any public pronouncements. For example, as I predicted yesterday, General Dostum has announced that he will support the new government after all. No reason is given, and he wasn't publicly threatened in any way, but someone had a talk to him and let him know in no uncertain terms what the cost to him would be for his continued intransigence. If we had gone public with that, he would then have been honor-bound to throw it back in our faces and resist to the death -- but doing that kind of string-pulling in private will work fine as long as it doesn't look to those he rules as if he knuckled under. On the contrary; he can play it exactly the opposite way: "I gave in just a teeny bit and as a result the west poured all this neat treasure in here; ain't I just the coolest thing you ever saw?"

So what is important is to keep the reality of foreign control (partial control, since it's important that we not do too much of this) invisible, and retain the image in the eyes of Afghanistan that they are primarily responsible for their fates, and that their leaders really are leading. And that is exactly what the use of foreign peacekeepers cannot do. By their nature they are blatantly visible and also foreign and also propping up the government. I do not see how they can be used without at least damaging the credibility of the government, if not outright destroying it. Either they will be useless because they don't turn out to be needed, or else they will provide short term peace at the expense of long term chaos. It's not a good trade.

Shipments of humanitarian aid will be extremely vulnerable for the next few months and will have to be protected against bandits, and that's going to take armed guards, quite posssibly foreign ones. Guards on food shipments don't generate that problem, though; they have a specific and well-defined task and it doesn't have anything to do with the legitimacy of the government.

The real goal here is not short-term order but long-term stability. We've already accepted a great deal of chaos and violence to accomplish that; to suddenly get gutless and sacrifice that simply to stop any more bloodshed in the short term is wrong. Better to try to keep the peace with Afghan troops, accept that this will not be as effective in the short term as foreign troops would be, and recognize that using Afghans for this will lend legitimacy to the government and not destabilize it. While this may force us to accept a higher level of short term chaos and disorder, it inhances the long term prospects for order and stability. It's the right way to bet. The Afghans do need to rule themselves eventually anyway; now's a good time to start. (discuss)