Nato is shipping a $2.7bn 'iron mountain' of arms to Kabul, but that's no substitute for public trust in corruption-free policing
In the continuing struggle for Afghanistan's future, Nato hopes that a massive transfer of weapons and equipment will finally tip the balance in its favour. Over the next eight months, Afghanistan's security forces look forward to receiving a series of arms shipments worth $2.7bn that Nato planners have dubbed the "iron mountain". The weapons are a crucial component of Nato's plan to transfer ever-increasing responsibility for Afghanistan's security to the Afghan army and police, while steadily drawing down its own forces on the ground. The haul will reportedly include 22,000 vehicles, 40,000 weapons, 44 aircraft and tens of thousands of radios and communications devices – the largest transfer of military equipment in the past eight years of conflict.
Impressive as this mountain may be, some Afghan defence leaders argue that it isn't large enough to assure their struggling nation's security. Afghanistan Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak insists that he needs high-performance fighter aircraft to intimidate and defeat the Taliban.
Wardak's hunger for fighter aircraft suggests that he fundamentally misunderstands the conflict he is engaged in and the enemy he confronts. The idea that a few Afghan jets will intimidate the Taliban is laughable. Nato has been flying the world's most lethal combat aircraft over the Afghanistan non-stop for years, dropping bombs an average of 20 times every day for the month of July alone. But even as Nato rules the skies, the Taliban insurgency steadily erodes Kabul's ties with the population back on earth, armed with little more than small arms, rockets and improvised explosives.
What Wardak and other Afghan leaders apparently fail to appreciate is that no "iron mountain" of weapons, however large or expensive, is sufficient to protect their government if they fail to govern well. Much of Afghanistan's continuing agony is the product of official corruption and lawlessness, conditions the Taliban are quick to exploit. The roadside bomb that kills an Afghan official is often the result of humiliation and desperation, not fanaticism or loyalty to the Taliban. When an otherwise peaceful father is blackmailed into marrying his young daughter to a corrupt local official four times her age, the Taliban is only too willing to help him satisfy his thirst for revenge.
Good governance and rule of law are the Karzai government's best defence. Unfortunately, Kabul remains unable to deliver. While Wardak pesters Nato to give him fighters that cost $7,000 an hour to fly, Afghanistan's police force founders, crippled by illiteracy, low pay, short training periods for new recruits and a lack of basic accountability. While most police corruption goes unreported, nearly 200 policemen were accused of murder and just over 4,600 were involved in reported crimes last year. In a recent UN survey, three in five Afghans saw the police as corrupt, one in four reported seeing a policeman use narcotics, and more than half said that reporting police corruption to authorities would have no effect or make the situation worse.
It would be morally untenable and militarily foolish for us to ask young Afghans to fight the Taliban while denying them needed weapons and equipment. But debating the size and make-up of Nato's weapons shipments to Kabul misses the larger point. The struggle for Afghanistan will be decided with well-trained and honest soldiers, police, prosecutors and judges – not high-tech weapons. If Nato truly wishes to withdraw from Afghanistan responsibly, it must invest as heavily in Afghanistan's legal system as it has in its military. No mountain of munitions is a substitute for an honest cop on the beat.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/25/afghanistan-nato-arms-defence
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