Occasionally, I manage to convince other people to let me write for them. The good folks over at Vice News are such people, and this week I’ve got a piece on Dostum, Raziq, and Azizullah. I’m not terribly excited about their future here.
A warlord, an illiterate drug smuggler, and a CIA-funded killer walk into a war.
That’s not the setup to a joke — it’s the punchline to America’s failed intervention in Afghanistan. President Barack Obama said yesterday that US forces would be all but out of the country by the end of 2016. That may be America’s best political solution to Afghanistan’s military problem, but the reduced footprint will make it much harder to keep an eye on the less savory characters the Americans have used there to help fight al Qaeda.
In addition to throwing around the kind of money that would make Jordan Belfort blush — grossly misspent reconstruction dollars, self-described “money as a weapons system” tactics that have kept Afghanistan more corrupt than a Syrian presidential election — the US has pinned Afghanistan’s security hopes on a motley group of bad actors and dangerous thugs who’ve been welcomed with open arms by American forces who are more desperate for a win than Leonardo DiCaprio at the Oscars.
Abdul Rashid Dostum, General Abdul Raziq, and Commander Azizullahare are Afghan-centric counterinsurgency’s Three Stooges — but with more human rights violations.
Check out the rest of the article here.