As you might guess, the dirt on the Afghanistan debacle has now been coming out in the wash.
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| Otto von Bismarck Was Right .... Realpolitik |
One striking fact was that apparently most of the armed forces attributed to the Afghan state, were in fact a paper, 'ghost' army.
They were created by local generals and government officials just to defraud the USA, who were paying their wages. Many of the generals and local commanders were also taking bribes to surrender without a fight once the 2,500 western forces had left.
This was all admitted by Khalid Payenda, Afghanistan's ex-finance minister, who has confirmed that that most of the 300,000 troops and police on the government's books did not exist, and in fact may have been inflated inflated by more than six times. The whole regime was in fact rotten with corruption from the very start, and would never have stood up by itself.
This just confirms my statement that the type of regime we introduced was wrong ... we should have gone for something far more traditional and encouraged women's rights to be improved via NGO's providing schools etc. We made the 20th century western mistake of ignoring 'Realpolitik', and trying to create a western model, where it would never naturally occur. i.e. Democracy doesn't really exist anywhere in the Muslim world, and especially in the region where Afghanistan lies.
Western pressure groups and NGO's are as much to blame for this fiasco as our politicians, by forcing the US and Western governments to try and create something that couldn't survive and would just be a vehicle for corruption and state theft.
By doing so they have wasted billions, and set back the possible growth of a local democracy by decades if not centuries. The western trend towards unrealistic politics and objectives, will be our eventual undoing, in a world where countries such Russia, China, Turkey and Iran, as well as other forces such as Jihadist Islam, are all playing by another rule book.
We need to reset our sights for more achievable objectives if we are not to be sidelined in the much harder world that is developing again ... we have already lost the opportunity that the fall of the USSR afforded us, we now have to face up to the reality of the new world that is coming.
All this woke crap in our foreign policy started in the 1960s in Africa, when Europeans decolonised the continent. Just look how well that turned out, and see how we failed ... 60 years later and corruption is high ... democracy is low. We just don't get it that our values don't work in the backwards areas.
ReplyDeleteDemocracy never developed natively outside of Europe, so why we continue to think that its the aspiration of other races or regions is a mystery. After a shaky start democracy has stuck in Japan, in South Korea and the Philippines.
ReplyDeleteIn the rest of that region its not practised. Its a similar case in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Arab world is also only spottily 'democratic' and even South America has a weak democratic profile, with spells of military rule in nearly all states.
I am assuming both comments are from the same person (apologies if I am wrong). Yes we have seemingly been following policies abroad that have ultimately been counter productive. But I guess that our politicians would argue that they did so for the best of reasons. However I would argue that more realpolitik, and less idealism would have proved more successful. Thanks for he comment(s).
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