The United States has issued a clear warning to Afghanistan’s president that he must fight corruption, or may not get significantly more US troops. But the Obama administration has a weak hand as it seeks to play tough with few other options if President Hamid Karzai refuses to go along.
A series of leaks Wednesday in Washington, expressing strong misgivings about Karzai, were a clear and public demand that the Afghan president must begin cleaning up his government before the US will commit to bolstering the American troop presence. So far, however, Karzai has shown little political will to crack down on corruption, despite public statements that he intends to rid his new administration of abuses.
He was re-elected this month to a second five-year term after a fraud-marred election. Corruption, weapons trafficking and drug smuggling have risen sharply during the past five years — along with attacks by the Taleban. Yet in reality, the Obama administration has few real pressure points it can apply to get Karzai to do what it wants. The reason? The US can’t afford to lose the war against the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan — which President Barack Obama calls the central front in the war on terror — without a huge blow to its broader efforts against extremism.
And there may be no way to win that war without putting at least some combination of more US combat and training troops into the troubled country. “The real difficulty is that the international community doesn’t have an alternative to the government they’re dealing with. And Karzai is well aware of that,” said Malcolm Chalmers of the Royal United Services Institute, a military think tank in London. “The election has strengthened Karzai’s hand vis-a-vis the Americans,” he said. “He called our bluff and so he is in a very strong bargaining position.”
Some Western officials believe Karzai has calculated exactly that — that for all the complaints about corruption and weak government, the US and its partners have little choice but to continue supporting his leadership. Karzai alluded as much in a US interview last week when he said: “The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan. It is here to fight the war on terror. .... The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after Sept. 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that too, nobody bothered about us.”
Yet the warnings that came from Washington on Wednesday were some of the sharpest ever — and Karzai’s people were stunned by them. US officials in Washington revealed to reporters that US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a retired general who once commanded troops in Afghanistan, had questioned the wisdom of sending more troops in multiple cables back to Washington over the past week. Eikenberry urged the administration to step cautiously in planning for any major troop buildup while there are still so many questions surrounding Karzai, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations and the classified documents. Indeed, asking Americans and Britons and others to send more soldiers to prop up a corrupt government in far-off Afghanistan is a tough sell — especially at a time when public support for the war is slipping in both the US and Europe.
“There is a belief among some that the international commitment to Afghanistan will continue whatever happens because of the strategic importance of Afghanistan,” the head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, said this month.
“I would like to emphasize that that is not correct,” he warned. “It is the public opinion in donor countries and in troop-contributing countries that decides on the strength of that commitment.”
Options, however, are few, and the risks of failure are high. Abandoning Karzai now would risk the failure of all US policy goals in Afghanistan — and neighboring Pakistan too — after more than 830 American deaths. One avenue short of a major US troop increase is to accelerate the training and growth of Afghanistan’s security forces. Current plans call for boosting the Afghan Army from 92,000 soldiers to 134,000 by late 2011. US officials say the combined army and police forces need to increase to about 400,000 by 2014.
But NATO officials believe it will take five years to produce 100,000 combat-ready Afghan troops. And a rapid expansion of the army raises questions whether one of the world’s poorest countries can sustain a force without billions of dollars in international aid. It also is not clear that any such Afghan Army would be disciplined, trained and noncorrupt enough to succeed.
