Opinion: Corruption plagues Afghanistan: Election fraud shows U.S. shouldn't commit more troops
By Matthew GomezStaff Writer
Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants as many as 60,000 more troops in Afghanistan to “change the operational culture to connect with people.” While President Obama is unsure of how to handle the situation, sending more troops to Afghanistan won’t help the people if their government continues to act as corrupt as the terrorists occupying the country.
As of Oct. 1, approximately 67,700 U.S. and international combat troops were stationed in Afghanistan, according to the International Security Assistance Force, the coalition of U.S., NATO and other countries with troops there.
U.S. forces cannot help the country if the body responsible for the people of Afghanistan — their own government — is not willing to help. The war in Afghanistan was started to oust a terrorist threat that not only attacked our country but occupied theirs.
Due to our presence, the first democratic election was held in Afghanistan in 2004. But today those elected leaders are just as big a threat to the people of Afghanistan as the Taliban and al-Qaida.
In 2004, Hamid Karzai was the first democratically elected leader of Afghanistan. After summer elections placed him as the front-runner, 1,500 polling places were determined to either be run by the Taliban or located in places “so insecure that no one from the Independent Electoral Commission, the Afghan army or the Afghan police had ever visited,” according to a Time Magazine article this month.
The Taliban threatened to cut off the fingers of anyone seen with the ink spot that signified they had voted. While tallying votes, the Electoral Complaints Commission found 1.5 million votes to be fraudulent, one-third of those being for Karzai.
While the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is still necessary to stop a re-takeover of the country by the Taliban, a troop increase will not help achieve our goals. Until the government can decide who it wants to partner with — the U.S. or the Taliban — there should be no troop increase.
Our presence is not fully appreciated, and as necessary as it is to try and help the people, that cannot happen without the support of their own government.
According to a 66-page report leaked to the Washington Post, McChrystal believes, “we must interact more closely with the population and focus on operations that bring stability, while shielding them from insurgent violence, corruption and coercion.”
In the same report, McChrystal acknowledged, “International Security Assistance Forces has not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley. This complex environment is challenging to understand, particularly for foreigners.”
ISAF still does not understand the people they are trying to interact with. Sending more troops is not going to solve that.
McChrystal is right to want to connect more with the people of Afghanistan and focus on protecting them from insurgents, but the government of Afghanistan poses his biggest problem.
An April 8 Time Magazine article noted that, according to the Obama administration, “the principal goal now is to counter terrorism and bring a degree of stability to Afghanistan — not to turn a poor and fractious nation into a flourishing democratic state.”
The goals of this war have been lowered, and yet our presence has become so tied into Afghanistan that more troops are needed to accomplish less. The government the U.S. forces helped democratize has already stooped to corrupting their own elections.
A report issued by the Department of Defense in January concluded, “building a fully competent and independent Afghan government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum, decades.”
How many generations of troops will be needed for decades of occupation? Our own country is in jeopardy. No one’s sure how long the U.S. economy will take to recover, and yet our leaders accept that attempts to build a “fully competent and independent Afghan government” will take decades?
Seeing as, eight years later, this war is not focused on preventing another terrorist attack, it cannot become the priority of our top leaders. At a time when unemployment is nearing 10 percent and the people of this country are worrying about feeding their families and keeping a roof over their heads, spending billions of dollars to democratize a corrupt nation does not seem worth the effort and countless lives.
