Afghanistan, which manages to generate only about $2 billion per year of its own revenues and depends on international donors for the rest of its budget, suffers from a kind of resource curse. With plenty of cash and no accountability to citizens—as well as minimal oversight by donors—Afghan officials are free to rip off donor resources and ignore or extort their fellow citizens with relative impunity.
With the exception of the current U.S. commander in Afghanistan, virtually everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved.
Emphasis, as always, added.
Faced with an impending withdrawal deadline and ineffectual Afghan security units, U.S. planners have pitched the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program as an affordable short-term fix to fill the country’s security vacuum. Yet despite some success in achieving security gains, ALP units have been accused of committing serious human rights abuses against local populations with apparent impunity.
From a Department of Homeland Security armed to the teeth to a dubious Nobel Peace Prize.
Is a country ever mature enough to possess a nuclear-weapons program?
International donors have sunk millions of dollars in an ineffectual, expensive, and easily circumvented Afghan voter registration system that is barely worthy of the name. But more importantly, the problems it is designed to address have proven completely negligible when compared to more prevalent forms of fraud such as ballot box stuffing and fraudulent counting.
In 2008, Seyed Hasan, a father of 6, fled his home in the Wardak province of eastern Afghanistan. Hasan’s family applied for refugee status in Turkey, but their initial claim was rejected. Over four years later, the family was finally granted refugee status. But their situation did not improve.
A panel of experts looks at the U.S. and NATO end game in Afghanistan.
Although most Washington policymakers would simply prefer that Afghanistan disappear, they must still come up with a politically palatable solution regarding U.S. involvement. Here are three scenarios for how the U.S. might manage its involvement in the country between now and 2014.