‘Like a Human Abattoir’

So say Canadian troops stationed in Afghanistan. It is literally a slaughterhouse, with wanton killings and death. Disembowelment is now a frequented tactic used by the Taliban, and there are reports that troopers have actually soiled themselves in anticipation of the combat.

This, in the great success story of NATO in Afghanistan, where western troops are forced to killing children as young as 13 in the course of the heavy fighting. In response to the ground-level reports emerging from the country, in the form of blogs, emails, and phone calls, the Ministry of Defense in Canada has issued stricter guidelines governing what soldiers are allowed to talk about, as if that would solve the problem of a drastically mis-matched force facing an intelligent, flexible, dynamic asymmetric guerilla force.

The situation continues to worsen. Just recently, a suicide bomber killed 8 civilians and 2 NATO troops were killed in an RPG ambush in and around Kandahar. It is very easy to look at the rest of the country, including relatively stable places like Jalalabad or Mazar-i-sharif, and assume “well, it’s just mop up.”

But that mopping up has occured all across the country, from Herat in the west (where the Taliban have staged repeated attacks on police and military units) to Kabul, where there remains a serious problem with suicide bombing. Indeed, there is deadly conflict across the country—in stark contrast to generally favorable reports (or no reports at all) in American media. It is a problem Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter, describes in detail in a shocking piece from the Bulletin. Not only is it easy to get the initial story wrong, there is editorial pressure from above to conform to a specific narrative, and when stories don’t there is backlash.

How sickening that we deliberately blind ourselves to what is going on. A look at the available statistics (pdf) for change in Afghanistan over the past five years is sobering: since 2001, poppy cultivation has increased by a factor of 20; the U.S. security budget has finally climbed back to its 2001 level; though education and telecommunications have improved, the lion’s share of domestic GDP is still in the form of aid and not income; and so on. It is interesting that the World Bank no longer breaks out GDP as one of its rising indicators, as the picture is bleak after five years: the only real source of money for Afghanistan is opium. The lack of such data in the latest surveys is shocking, as a mere six months ago I was able to find copious income and domestic revenue data for the previous two years. Months ago, they admitted that the overwhelming majority of Afghanistan’s economy was informal, yet there are no recommendations in their recent policy reports for how to record and integrate informal economic activity into the national economy. The most recent concluding statement from the IMF is similarly bleak, if officially optimistic: Afghanistan still faces serious problems, not least of which is a continuously underforming economy. This is tied to its informal nature, as unreported transactions cannot be taxed.

I think all of the unraveling economic activity can be tied directly back to the worsening security situation in the south and elsewhere. When people are not secure, they do not go shopping, or build buildings, or pave roads, or even go to school. When the local government is run by corrupt loya jirga members, drug lords, or the Taliban, there is little incentive to work licitly or take part in any kind of social activity. Indeed, fear seems to rule the day, no matter the brave statements from the government and the IGOs that have slowly mucked things up by not focusing on security first, institutions second, and democracy third. The idea of voting and women’s right came way too quickly to Afghanistan, shocking or offensive as that might sound. The Bush administration was much more interested in holding an election and declaring victory so he could invade Iraq, not in the painstaking, time consuming, and expensive process of establishing permanent social, political, and cultural institutions that would eventually lead the country to rising income and political liberalism.

We approached Afghanistan with our priorities reversed. And now our troops are paying the price, though not as badly as the poor locals, caught in the deadly cross fire.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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