A French diplomat warns that the West is failing in Afghanistan.
A French diplomat has let slip what has been obvious to many Americans for quite some time: the Western nation building project in Afghanistan is in dire shape:
The positive spin from the Americans has been running especially hard the last few weeks, as Congressional committees in Washington focus on spending bills and the Obama administration, trying to secure money for a few more years here, talks up the countryâ??s progress. The same is going on at the European Union, where the tone has been sterner than in the past, but still glosses predictions of Afghanistanâ??s future with upbeat words like â??promiseâ? and â??potential.â?Despite that, one of those rare truth-telling moments came at a farewell cocktail party last week hosted by the departing French ambassador to Kabul: Bernard Bajolet, who is leaving to head Franceâ??s Direction Génerale de la Sécurité Extérieure, its foreign intelligence service....
That the Afghan project is on thin ice and that, collectively, the West was responsible for a chunk of what went wrong, though much of the rest the Afghans were responsible for. That the West had done a good job of fighting terrorism, but that most of that was done on Pakistani soil, not on the Afghan side of the border. And that without fundamental changes in how Afghanistan did business, the Afghan government, and by extension the Westâ??s investment in it, would come to little.
His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact.
Look, this is why the bags-of-cash-to-Karzai story was neither surprising nor all that lamentable: what else could we do? Sure, it would have been nice if everyone in the U.S. government was on the same page about how to "influence" Afghanistan's government, but when is the U.S. government (let alone a consortium of international players, all with their own interests) ever on the same page?
(AP Photo)
