Ann Marlowe has a really disheartening assessment of what’s going on in Afghanistan. “First, and most important, our strategy makes no sense. We are supporting a criminal state in Kabul that is likely involved with the insurgency itself. There is almost nothing to distinguish the Taliban from the Karzai mafias, whose tentacles reach down to the most obscure rural districts.”
She asserts, with evidence from other media sources that corruption is just too profitable for the Karzai government to give it up. “The Afghan state is being hollowed out from the inside and becoming a branch of a lucrative criminal enterprise. Why would the Karzais have any interest in defeating the insurgency? They are profiting from it.”
Marlowe concludes with a tough question: “Effectively, we are in Afghanistan so that the Karzai cartel can steal even more money. Is that worth losing our soldiers for?”
If the answer to her question is ‘no’ what then?