Remember When Our Leaders Said They Wanted to Turn Afghanistan Into Colombia?

(A common theme on Registan.net)

Most recently, the Foreign Minister of Colombia said, on his way out the door to attend the London Conference on Afghanistan, that he hoped NATO officials would look to Colombia for an example of how to properly fight a narco-insurgency.

Ignoring the rather significant problem that FARC is not an Islamist resistance movement and has a dissimilar set of motivating beliefs and history, recent news still doesn’t exactly make the prospect of exporting Colombia to Afghanistan look like a good idea: there are growing reports of armed militia groups terrorizing the countryside, for example. And there are also increasing reports of government corruption leading to more support for the resistance.

There are armed resistance groups in 24 of Colombia’s 32 provinces. They are committing “egregious abuses and terrorizing the civilian population in ways all too reminiscent of the AUC,” according to a report by Human Rights Watch, referring to the federation of paramilitary groups called the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that demobilized more than 30,000 men between 2003 and 2006.

So if Colombia cannot properly demobilize its militias, and it cannot ease government corruption to an extent that it doesn’t actively drive support for the resistance, and it cannot meaningfully affect the drug-derived income of those resistance groups except to drive up their profits… why do we keep looking here for answers?

Colombia is only an example of what not to do in Afghanistan. We should seek to avoid, not emulate, its recent history.

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.