Snark of the Day

Apparently, the Afghan Military Had Something in Common With the Massachusetts State House

—Charlie Pierce

The invaluable Mr. Pierce is referring, of course, to the Beacon Hill tradition of no-show jobs.

I cut my teeth covering politics in the Massachusetts State House, which is where Captain Blood would have done business had he gone to parochial school in Dorchester. I became very familiar with the activities of politicians in the wild—their quirks, their penchant for nickel-and-dime graft, the mysterious ability of their otherwise unemployable relatives to appear on state payrolls. After three years, I was Marlin Perkins in that Wild Kingdom. Or maybe I was Jim Fowler, the guy who had to wrestle snakes while Marlin sold life insurance during the breaks.

Imagine the shock of the familiar that came over me when I was reading the Special Investigator For Afghanistan Reconstruction report from 2015 and saw this:

Despite 13 years and several billions of dollars in salary assistance to the Afghan government for the ANP, there is still no assurance that personnel and payroll data are accurate. Since 2006, U.S. government audit agencies have consistently found problems with the tracking and reporting of Afghan National Police (ANP) personnel and payroll data.

………

In January 2015 SIGAR reported that more than $300 million in annual, U.S.-funded salary payments to the Afghan National Police were based on only partially verified or reconciled data, and that there was no assurances that personnel and payroll data were accurate. SIGAR found similar deficiencies during the course of the April 2015 audit of Afghan National Army personnel and payroll data. There are continuing reports of significant gaps between the assigned force strength of the ANDSF and the actual number of personnel serving.

………

All that money going all that distance around the globe, and we end up with a no-show job scam. All that high-falutin’ rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and we find out that our war is being run as though it were a Middlesex County road crew. I admire the departed Afghan government’s dedication to the classics, however.

Yes, the US State Security Apparatus created an even more corrupt and dysfunctional version of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) (as Charles P. Pierce would say) in Afghanistan.

The problem here is that the interventions^* the US has made, notwithstanding the assertions otherwise, have never had the slightest concern about human rights and the rule of law.

They have been exclusively about enriching politically connected actors in the United States, and advancing US geopolitical goals.  (The Great Game)

We invariably act brutally and stupidly, and we put the worst of the worst in charge, because they will kowtow to US demands, and equally invariably, we fail, and are left with a country hostile to US interests.

This is not a sustainable strategy.

^*Just since WWII, and not a complete list: Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Vietnam, and Iran, and Italy, and Korea, and Syria, and Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and Brazil, and Indonesia, and Cuba, and Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, and Guyana, and Laos, and Cambodia, and Chile, and Bolivia, and Ecuador, and Panama, and Grenada, and Libya, and Somalia, and Iraq, and Haiti, and the former Yugoslavia, and Greece, and Russia, and Australia.