PING!
Posted on 03/11/2006 4:59:09 AM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
I got an email several days ago. Because of the tempo of the last week, I haven’t been able to check my civilian email, so I didn’t read it until today, but it struck me as a great way to indicate to everyone just how complex the situation is in Afghanistan. So I downed tools and wrote.
(I should also mention that I have become frustrated enough with what I keep hearing on the news from Canada, that Canadians are having second thoughts about this mission. I won’t steal my own thunder, but I have been plugging away at a post for a few days, and hopefully I will get it done and posted quickly. Never type angry, my boss keeps saying; but I can’t seem to help sounding infuriated when I get on that topic. Enough said. I’ll take a deep breath and finish it tomorrow.)
My little post the other week about going to a school sparked a lot more interest than I thought it would. But children are not just popular with soldiers, and I got many more private emails than blog comments. One correspondent asked, could he send Canadian flag pencils to give to the children, if only as an icebreaker?
Pencils are a great idea. Pencils and writing paper are things that I get asked for every day, not just by schoolchildren but by their parents as well. But you need to understand a few things.
Afghanistan is the second poorest country in the world. Kandahar is one of the poorest cities in Afghanistan. Even successul, powerful people, unless they are warlords or involved in the drug trade, are very poor by Canadian standards. So if I give a school principal a thousand dollars and tell him to buy supplies for his school, what do you think happens? His house gets a roof that won’t collapse in the rain, his children get shod, and his whole family becomes less undernourished. If I give him a thousand pencils for his students, the next day they are on sale in the bazaar, and the result is the same.
Can you look him in the eye and tell him he’s done wrong?
The natural tendency, then, is to give to the students themselves. But does anyone think we can visit every school in the country, every month, and refill every student’s bag?
Schools, police, water, power, sanitation, health… the problem is the same for them all. And at all levels, from the lowest manager to the regional director. Are there the purely corrupt, who could live comfortably without embezzling? Of course there are. Everywhere, and at all levels too. Low grade bribery is part of Middle Eastern culture, but the distinction between baksheesh and outright graft is pretty murky no matter where you’re from.
All that won’t be a surprise to any of you. But let me tell you about other factors that you’re probably not aware of.
Afghanistan is peopled by many different cultures. In the north live Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen. In the middle of the country, there are the Hazara, possibly the descendants of Ghengiz Khan’s Mongol Horde, Nuristanis, and Baloch. And in the south, there are the Pashtuns. Ethnic divisions are not clear-cut - nothing is in Afghanistan - and sizable populations of Tajiks live in the south and Pashtuns in the centre and so on. But each province has its ethnic makeup, and in Kandahar, like in Waziristan across the Pakistani border, the Pashtuns predominate.
Pashtuns form the largest tribal society in the Islamic world. They view themselves as the natural leaders of Afghanistan, and despise peoples like the Hazara as a sort of underclass. Their relations with one another are dominated by a tribal code called pashtunwali, which values above all honour, hospitality, loyalty, bravery, revenge, and fierce individualism. This code has some pretty inexplicable facets - it is perfectly acceptable under pashtunwali, for example, to change sides in the middle of a battle for a bribe. You don’t have to understand it, but if you are doing business here you have to deal with it.
Pashtuns are hardly monolithic either. One is not simply a Pashtun, one is a Durrani or a Ghilzai; and one is not simply a Ghilzai or a Durrani, one is a Popolzai or a Barakzai or an Alikozai or an Ishaqzai Durrani Pashtun, or a member of one of dozens of other tribes. It doesn’t end there; families come next. And it is a vast understatement to call the interrelationships complex. Don’t try building a road through a Barakzai area using Alikozai labour, unless the Barakzai of that area have just concluded an agreement with the Alikozai families. And be prepared for it all to go pear-shaped in a heartbeat, for reasons you will never fully understand.
As the Pashtuns say: I against my brother - I and my cousin against the world.
So you can’t give everyone what they need, and you can’t give it to their leaders to give to them. And if you give it to them in the wrong way, or in the wrong amounts, or at the wrong time…
Add to this soup of ethnic rivalry and ancient blood feud a weak central government and organized crime. Throw in poppy for good measure (an even more complex topic, which I will discuss at another time).
Notice I haven’t even mentioned the Taliban. They are only part of the problem here - a big part, and a part that has proven exceptionally adept at manipulating tribal divisions and ethnic rivalries (not to mention incorporating organized crime). So adept, in fact, that the roles played by any of these factors in a particular incident can be essentially impossible to unravel. But for us to focus on a single enemy when we are fighting so many foes at once would be to guarantee failure.
So what’s the answer? Just as complex as the problem itself - but it will be slow. I have written before about the ‘Long War’. We have to attack every problem at once. Not everywhere, not all the time, for all Western society put together could scarcely muster the necessary resources, but at all levels at once. We must hold leaders accountable - and do what we can to force out the excessively corrupt and incompetent. We must help the intelligent, determined, and patriotic to learn the skills of nation building, public administration, policing, education, and business. We must target our reconstruction efforts to reward successes. Eventually, we must diminish the influence of tribalism - slow though that process will be. We must build the confidence of Afghans in their own government over foreign aid - which is why we give Afghans Afghan flags, not the maple leaf.
And we must have the patience to stay here, and work, and fight, and suffer, until this is done. Or every dollar spent, every life lost will have been wasted.
So I will do my job. I will organize, and coordinate, and direct, and assist the various parts of the PRT to do the things that they do, all of which attack the problems at different levels and in different ways. I will work in from my office, in meeting rooms, and on patrol. I will tell Canadians about what we are doing, so fewer will be misinformed by the misguided. I will do this all day, every day, while I am here.
And I will give little children pencils and paper.
ping
Sounds like a Libertarian paradise.
PING!
Is there any way that I can help get paper and pencils over there to help you out?
SFC Gozy's APO address probably isn't any good. Think he left.
When discussing the complexities of the WOT and all of the subplots within, the average Joe back in the USA, runs out of patience with me, before I can rattle off more than the top 10 or top 20 problems being solved ALL AT ONCE by our forces and their coalition partners. It even begins to overwhelm me, just telling the tale. The author of this post has a keen grasp of the road ahead in Afghanistan. Long... understatment, winding... understatement, road... yes, once the engineers build it. That's another problem...
Very fine read of a very fine NCO! I missed making this NCO's acquaintance.
You probably saw him and didn't know who he was. Big white E-7 down at the Main Gate.
I was stationary at my job (more or less) so the personnel I remember best, were the ones I worked with daily at the batch plant, or at the engineering white house. Sounds like your duties took you to about every nook and cranny at KAF.
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