I heard Sarah Chayes at the Michigan Theater on Thursday afternoon, speaking on Afghanistan.
She is a long time expatriate in Qandahar, where she arrived late in 2001 as a reporter. She has gone on to be an entrepreneur of the Peace Corps kind, and a consultant to the ISAF forces.
The one thing she said that most struck me was the absolute panic and profound disappointment that afflicted her circles in Qandahar in fall of 2009, when it became clear that Hamid Karzai had successfully stolen the presidential election. She said that some of her Afghan friends thought about emigrating to Pakistan. Others determined to get rich quick, by any means possible. She represented their reaction as one of disillusionment with the United States, at its inability to stand up a government better than that of the Taliban and Mujahidin. She described Afghanistan as increasingly beset by mafia and warlord rule, and apparently Karzai’s ballot fraud deprived people of any hope that things would get better any time soon. (In corroboration, I’d point out that Gen. David Petraeus is said to have referred to the Karzai brothers as themselves a criminal cartel, a remark that seems more prescient every day.)
Chayes was also scathing on the US military’s hopes of standing up a 400,000 man security force and turning things over to it. She insisted that the military derived its legitimacy from the civilian political structure, and that if the latter were weak or corrupt, the military would just fall apart after the US left. I understood her to want vastly more resources put into supporting good civilian governance, in preference to putting all the eggs in the military basket.
Chayes’ book on Afghanistan is The Punishment of Virtue.
See for similar comments on the ‘other midterms’, those in Afghanistan this fall, this essay at Tomdispatch by Ann Jones.
