Afghanistan is an object lesson in how to ‘unbuild’ a country

As the US government cracks down on global corruption, it has built up and funded in the past 20 years one of the world’s worst corruption machines, the Afghan government and its military. Washington has been targeting foreign companies and governments and jailing their officials, such as former Hong Kong home secretary Patrick Ho Chi-ping, sometimes for alleged crimes with minimal connections to any direct US interests.

But it has deliberately turned a blind eye to the loss of uncounted tens of billions in funds, materials and aid it and other rich allies had provided to the war-torn country.

This is not just about America’s typical double standards. Rather, it is at the very root of Washington’s total defeat in Afghanistan, just as it did with its other infamous foreign policy disaster in Vietnam. Quite simply, if money intended to rebuild a country ends up lining the pockets of political bosses and favoured “businessmen”, nothing will get done, and there will be no winning hearts and minds.

China, Russia embassies stay put in Afghanistan as US and allies flee

At least a corrupt corporation paying a tinpot dictator for a commodity mine can get it working to its own production specifications; the United States government never managed to get the Afghan government and military “working” in any sense of the word.

But the corruption-collapse is only one side of the equation. The other side is democracy promotion; or democracy by invasion. A country or culture with no history of Western-style electoral democracy will not magically end up practising it; the only way to impose it is at the barrel of a gun. This has created for Washington the illusion of having created a legitimate government and freeing an oppressed people.

In reality, a corrupt government will only run corrupt elections, which in turn can only spawn more corrupt officials and cronies, shielded by the fig leaf of “democracy” to satisfy Washington politicians.

There is no mystery, just common-sense understanding, to America’s utterly humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and the Afghan government’s “sudden” collapse in Kabul this weekend. Well, it has been a shock and a mystery to many Americans, though, of course, because they are fed on a regular diet of mainstream news media, which for obvious but unstated reasons, can never state the obvious as to why their country, after wasting so many lives and blood, materials and funds to the tune of US$2 trillion, is back to where it started after the tragedy of September 11; or rather much worse off today.

If you really want to understand Afghanistan or the world at large, the business pages of the Western mainstream news media are far more enlightening and informative than its political op-eds, editorials and international news.

Business journalists have written insightfully on some of Afghanistan’s worst financial scandals, such as those involving the near collapse of the Kabul Bank, the Afghan airline Kam Air and the unimaginable corruption of the former Afghan government of Hamid Karzai, Washington’s one-time man-of-the-hour in Kabul, and on the country’s consistent rankings at the bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index. Those business stories explain better why America lost Afghanistan than any editorialists and geopolitical pundits.

As ordinary Afghans face the wrath of the Taliban, who are taking over the entire country, the former top people of the collapsed government in Kabul will be enjoying a luxurious lifestyle in exile in places such as Ankara, Istanbul, Dubai and Virginia with funds they siphoned off international aid and donations. They knew the day of reckoning would come far better than most US politicians and generals.

To avoid embarrassment, it’s highly unlikely US prosecutors and auditors will go after those criminals, for fear of exposing Washington’s complicity. Their US bosses encourage them to crack down on international corruption, but only selectively.

In effect, weapons manufacturers, private military contractors, senior Afghan officials and generals, criminals, terrorists, smugglers and drug traffickers have done extremely well for themselves from America’s longest war, but not American taxpayers and especially not the Afghan people.

Washington spent more than US$88 billion to create the Afghan National Army and police, two-thirds of the money it poured into the country over two decades. But as the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, an independent watchdog, reported in October 2017, it was “unable to publicly report on most of the US-taxpayer-funded efforts to build, train, equip, and sustain [the Afghan forces]”.

How did Afghan government forces collapse so quickly this month? Well, why die for your country when your officers have taken your wages and run away? However, what did American politicians think that people in positions of power would do when they were given so much money with little oversight in a poverty-stricken and underdeveloped country in the first place?

Where did all that money go? Your guess is as good as the inspector general’s.