Austin Bay notes the upcoming offensive by the Taliban. The trick is, the new offensive is already here, and has been since at least September, when there was a 3x increase in attacks on NATO and PRT teams. He does touch on the usual tropes of getting Pakistan to “do something” to tighten up its borders, and so on, but this is pretty flimsy in light of his other work. All he can point to is the progress made by the PRTs.
Except they haven’t posted much progress, not even after five years. Most of the PRTs are involved in dealing with the opium problem, which means, thanks to constraints placed from on-high, eradication, which clearly does not and has not worked. I’ve documented how some were plopped into the middle of the Afghani wilderness, having had no training in the language, culture, and customs of the area, and told to work wonders. While some positive change is happening, there still needs to be a concerted effort to fix the situation on the ground, and that starts at the policy level.
The depressing story of Holly Barnes Higgins is instructive. A veteran humanitarian worker, she went to Helmand in late 2005 with a genuine and well-intentioned desire to help the people there rebuild their lives. What she found instead—constant suicide bombings, threats, security so tenuous she could never take the same route to work and her assistants were under death threats—was so bad she considers herself lucky to have escaped with her life. Similarly, she has to deal with nervous poppy farmers, trying to ensure them that a NATO-sponsored DynCorp team won’t fly overhead, spraying toxic chemicals onto their crops and destroying their livelihood that year.
Many, if not most, PRTs know what they should do to make things better. But they are hampered by illogical rules and regulations from USAID and other oversight organizations. I’m fascinated that Bay is supremely optimistic about how Afghanistan is progressing, while everyone who goes there comes away depressed and pessimistic.
Watch this space for more over the next week or so.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 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