No quick fix to Afghanistan crisis
There are many reasons why Afghanistan is in the chaos it is today. One of the most important reasons is the logic used by the politicians in our Western democracies. Our politicians cannot acknowledge that a problem exists unless they can also describe the solution in simple “sound bite” terms. No politician is willing to admit they don't have a solution to every problem. Thus, complex problems cannot be acknowledged.
In Afghanistan, politicians saw what they wanted to see: Afghanistan functioning as a democracy with a robust military for self-defence. So, the Afghanistan problem had been solved. No one asked the hard questions, and any evidence to the contrary was ignored or ridiculed.
What they refused to see, as they had no simple answer for it, was that Afghanistan was a house of cards. An inept and corrupt government mismanaging a highly divided country, backed by a poorly trained and under supported military. No politician wanted to admit the truth, that after 20 years and countless billions of dollars spent they had failed.
“Solving” Afghanistan by building a real working democracy will take many years. No one knows how to build a democracy in a country so divided by cultural, language, religious and tribal differences. There is no simple solution. To make loyalty to a central government more important than loyalty to the local tribal or religious leader is an incredibly difficult task that will take strong, honest Afghan leaders, and multiple generations to solve. It won't be fixed by any politician's sound bites.
Keith Dawson, Nepean