Alex de Waal is Wrong on Afghanistan

In an essay for Prospect magazine (UK), Africa expert Alex de Waal offers his solution to Afghanistan's governance and security problems: more corruption.

"NATO has crippled Karzai’s ability to bargain properly," writes the contrarian researcher best known for his work on Sudan. "Foreign firepower and funds give him the strongest hand in the souk, but western demands to stamp out corruption and defeat the Taliban stop him playing his best cards."

It reads like sarcasm, but that is de Waal's actual thesis --the state-building project has failed because it has not involved enough payoffs to the country's various powerbrokers, and the remedy now is to help Hamid Karzai bribe his rivals, from opposition politicians to the Taliban, into passivity. De Waal argues that only money talks in failed states, and "a well-managed, inclusive patronage system is often the only way of running such countries." So, naturally, "it would be more cost-effective to ditch the extra troops and revert to funding patronage."

De Waal could not be more wrong.

De Waal: "Underneath the old model remains: a political souk where buyers and sellers haggle over the going rate for renting allegiances."

It is descriptively true that corruption is entrenched, but where does that leave us? Afghans passionately hate corruption. Poll after poll tells us this, and ordinary Afghans lament the level of corruption in their country to foreign journalists every chance they get. Corruption is not in Afghan DNA, and it is antithetical to Afghan social norms. The pervasiveness of corruption today is largely a product of a get-rich-and-get-out mentality fed by the displacement of three-quarters of the population during thirty years of war.

De Waal: "Karzai’s best asset is that he knows how his country works, with loyalties transacted on the basis of kinship, faith and cash. The Taliban showed that a government can be run cheaply on the first two alone."

The Taliban did not run a tidy Islamic state by appealing to kinship and faith, they ruled most of a territory through violence and fear. What the Taliban established could hardly be called a state at all, even by a minimalist definition. Their idea of service delivery was Radio Shariat and ethnic cleansing. The Afghan Taliban are not, and were never, comparable to Islamist-nationalist welfare-providing organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah, or even Somalia's deposed Islamic Courts Union. Let's not use the Taliban regime as a model for governance --even an "alternative model"-- ever, anywhere. It is a recipe for a humanitarian catastrophe.

De Waal: "In the months after 9/11, the Americans dollarised Afghanistan’s patronage system, flying in planeloads of shrink-wrapped $100 bills to pay off warlords, while putting on a fireworks display for the media to pretend that military might, not bribery, defeated the Taliban. It worked."

No, it did not work. What de Waal doesn't get --because he knows almost nothing about Afghanistan-- is that the CIA-cashwads-for-commanders scheme is a large part of why the Taliban are now winning strategically, while NATO, with its overwhelming tactical advantage, is losing. The US hobbled the Afghan state from the beginning by sidelining reformists for fear of rankling re-empowered old powerbrokers believed (incorrectly) necessary for averting a Taliban military comeback.

De Waal: "[...] this hardheaded approach was then abandoned in favour of the illusion that, freed from the aberrant Taliban, Afghanistan would begin a path towards western-style democracy."

"Western-style democracy" is hardly what has been promoted in Afghanistan. Governance projects have varied wildly in quality and many have been neglected. That said, Afghanistan now has a parliament that is more popular than the US Congress, and support for democratic values is strong. Afghans are deeply disenchanted with the outcome of the presidential election, but only because their expectations for the process --and for the international community's hand in it-- were so high at the outset.

Bottom line: Alex de Waal's suggested means of establishing peace in Afghanistan is ill-informed, dangerous, and already a spectacular failure. I have come to expect such nonsense from the likes of Fareed Zakaria and Fred Kaplan, but de Waal is a serious scholar and should know better.

[Photo: Alex de Waal. Social Science Research Council.]