Saving the World? Um......What?

A while back, in response to my post about being worn-down and tired of Afghanistan, a commenter asked me if I was here because I "wanted to be a world-improver, or just because of a job?" A fair question, and not one with a quick and easy answer.

To be clear, I have no illusions about "saving the world,"* And if I did, this place and this job is certainly not where I would start.

*I know, a HUGE shock to those of you who know me.

The world has always needed "saving" in one way or another, and somehow those efforts never seem to pay off quite as permanently as their advocates would like. From the Peace Corps in the 20th century all the way back to Roman efforts to civilize the barbarians in the 2nd century BCE, people have been trying to "fix" the wide variety of misfortunes and ills of the world. Whenver I'm confronted by one of these well-meaning but tragically naive do-gooders extolling the virtues of their NGOs new program to bring Pashto-language Sesame Street to school girls in Kandahar or whatever, I always ask the same question: "So how's that working out for you?" The answers are usually disappointing. So no, I'm not here to "save the world" or even rescue a small Afghan portion of it.

And I'm certainly not here for the money.* In fact, I venture to guess that most PSC contractors are not in it for the money. Sure, back in the crazy days of Iraq in 2003-4, a handfull of guys were getting paid big bucks to put their lives on the line, but pay scales aren't like that anymore, not in Iraq and not certainly not here. The competition is tougher and the industry has matured considerably in the last ten years.

*I could get paid more sitting behind a desk in DC wearing a tie. Except that I no longer own a tie.

All that said, one does hope that there might be some small lasting positive effect from one's efforts. For me personally and for the company as a whole, the value we provide stems from two important factors: security and jobs. The service we provide is security, and in so doing we employ a large number of Afghans who would otherwise be forced to scratch out a living as farmers or laborers.

All that other stuff, building schools, health clinics, instilling democracy, the empowerment of Afghan women, establishing a system of justice, all of that is necessary and good. But they are also irrelevant without security and jobs. Without at least a basic level of security and decent employment for most Afghans, we can build all the schools we want and this effort will still fail.

So, are private security companies saving the world, or even saving Afghanistan? No, but then we don't claim to be. We simply enable others to make that effort, and hopefully keep them safe while they're doing it. And lots of Afghan men can support their families on the salaries that PSCs pay. That's good enough for me.

But of course I never was an idealist.

Ghost Riders

Take a few minutes and read this article from Canada's The Star about a group of expats doing difficult but vital work down in Kandahar.

As Tim Lynch at Free Range International has pointed out many times, the only way to truly influence the population is to be outside the wire of the big FOBs, interacting with them on a daily basis. These guys with "Team Canada" have been doing that for several years in one of the toughest operating environments in all of Afghanistan. ISAF, NATO and the Pentagon could all take a lesson from them.

If you roll into a village in Strykers and MRAPs, with wrap-around sunglasses and bristling with high-tech weaponry, it should be no surprise that the locals don't come running to have a chat. Too often, ISAF forces* look and act like Imperial Stormtroopers, fearsome, intimidating and alien. Not exactly the best way to get the locals to trust you.

*The U.S. Army is particularly guilty of this sort of behaviour. Note that this is entirely due to Big Army's restrictive force protection rules, and not necessarily the choice of soldiers on the ground. Those rules are the result of the fact that the American public in general has not yet grasped the concept that we can't have a war without casualties.

An important distinction to bear in mind is that "low profile" does not mean "low security." With the exception clients who require it, we never move in armored vehicles and always strive not to be "guns up." Knowing the environment and the people in it is a much more effective guarantee of security than all the armor and firepower in the world. I'd rather ghost through unnoticed with help of friends and allies than trust to armor and firepower. Better to avoid the confrontation in the first place than to count on winning it.

This country has a myriad of problems that need fixing, but it all starts with two simple concepts: jobs and security. Everything else can wait. Without sufficient employment to give Afghans the chance at a better life, and the security to enjoy that life, nothing else matters.

The Ghost Riders of Team Canada are doing both simultaneously.

Even Capone Had a Lawyer

Disgraced journalist* Gerald Posner, who was a lawyer in a previous incarnation, has now decided to return to his professional roots by taking on a few new clients.


*Is the term "disgraced journalist" at risk of becoming redundant, like "slimy lawyer" or "corrupt politician?"


Apparently, he's decided that the way to reenter the legal profession is to seek out the most oppressed, maligned and downtrodden people he can find, and then write laughably stupid letters to the editor on their behalf. So, he trolls the world for suitably aggreived clients and settles on..................the Karzais? WTF?


Specifically, Posner, in a letter posted on the WSJ online, objects to the WSJ's earlier characterization of Mahmood Karzai (younger brother to Hamid) as a money-launderer and smuggler. Mahmood was one of two Afghans personally named in the recent report (although of course he's hardly the only one suspected of moving large sums of cash to Dubai).


After conducting his own interview with his new client, Posner concludes:

Mr. Karzai has never transferred large amounts of cash out of the country. He is willing to take a lie-detector test on this matter. This unproven and false accusation hurts him since he is the only Afghan businessman I'm aware of who is investing his money into the country—in large real-estate projects in Kandahar and the nation's infrastructure, such as its only cement plant*— rather than taking money out as many others have done. No Afghan businessman or politician or public figure is more transparent than Mahmood Karzai.

Is he seriously claiming that Mahmood Karzai is "the only Afghan businessman" investing money into the country? That's beyond stupid; it's insultingly stupid. Even my moronic boss, The Rug Merchant, no angel himself, has invested millions of US dollars into Afghanistan, and facilitated the investment of millions more.


*And those real estate deals and the cement plant? Hardly examples of free enterprise at work. There's only one cement plant in Kandahar because Ahmed Wali Karzai, the President's other brother (the really naughty one) only allows one cement plant in Kandahar, so he can charge what he likes to construction companies. Monopolistic extortion. The real estate deals are based on the Afghan conception of emminent domain, basically "I have more guns than you, so get the hell off your land and give it to me so I can rent it to foreigners, OK?"


According to Charles Homans at Foreign Policy, Posner is representing other members of the Karzai clan as well, including older brother Qayum and the aforementioned Ahmed Wali. Posner is quoted as saying, "They're really proud of the reputations they have earned." That statement is so bizarre I can't even begin to ridicule it.*


*Although I suspect that Ahmed Wali Karzai truly is proud of his reputation as the "King of Kandahar." It's just that he's so far gone as to actually believe that he is a virtuous and magnamimous emir, rather than a brutal thug and petty tyrant.


On the upside, I don't think anyone can accuse Posner of plagarizing this stuff, since no one else would ever consider writing it.

$1 trillion USD of.......oh, screw it.

ISAF military operations, corruption in the government, strategic planning by the Obama administration, the weaknesses of current counter-insurgency theory, and all sorts of other Afghanistan-centered topics generate a predictable response in the blogosphere. Often the commentary is juvenile, hyperbolic or just plain wrong, but generally it barely rises beyond the level of nitpicking among COIN specialists or partisan hackery. There's often an undertone of negativity and defeatism, as the old saying about "bad news selling more papers" applies just as accurately to blog traffic, but no single article usually creates quite the firestorm that seems to have ignited over this article in the NY Times.

Maybe it's the overwhelming eminence of The Grey Lady, or perhaps their oft-perceived liberal bias or maybe simply the fact that the headline seemed custom-made to demand investigation and counter-point.*

*Here's a fun mental exercise: skim any major US paper (or British for that matter), reading only the headlines. Formulate in your head your own perception of the days events, and then go back and actually read the articles. I'm betting that the headline-induced perception is significantly different than the reality described in the articles.

To summarize, underneath a headline that read, "U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan," the text of the article went on to say:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

That's a pretty shocking headline, and an exceptionally bold opening paragraph. The rest of the article includes phrases like "the vast scale of Afghanistan's mineral wealth," "stunning potential" and (my personal favorite) "the Saudi Arabia of lithium."*

*Afghanistan is probably one of the few countries that aspires to be the "Saudi Arabia" of anything. Personally, I'll take decadent poverty over the Vice and Virtue Police.

Apparently, there are potentially significant deposits of iron, copper, cobolt, gold, lithium and something called niobium.*

*So who gets to name these things anyway? Is "niobium" really the best name we could come up with for a mineral? Sounds like a particularly unimportant part of a dog's salivary system. "Well, if you ever want Sparky to lick his own ass again, we'll have to remove his infected niobium."

As the article goes to great lengths to emphasize, all of this is potentially hugely beneficial for Afghanistan. Mining, especially for iron and copper, is largely low-skilled industry, which suits Afghanistan's total lack skills rather nicely. I assume that lithium, cobolt and niobium require a bit more technology and know-how to extract, but still the revenue would be nice for a cash-strapped government. Someday, in the distant future, maybe these deposits will generate some revenue for the government. It will take billions of dollars of foreign investment, not to mention replacing a tenacious insurgency with a functioning government, but at least it's possible.

I'm no optimist when it comes to the eventual fate of this 12th century shithole, and the article didn't sufficiently address the difficulties and dangers of this possible bonanza. It also fails to clarify where the $1 trillion USD figure came from, or when this "discovery" was actually made (Hint: the guys who originally stumbled on this had the hammer and sickle on their passports). But even I was a little put off by the exceedingly negative "gotcha" reaction of the blogosphere.

A sampling:

• The normally restrained Blake Houshell at Foreign Policy: Say What?
• The (almost) always reliable Andrew Exum at CNAS (who actually cites Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion in his analysis. Seriously?)
• The not-entertainingly snarky Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic.
• Conor's lazy comrade-in-arms, Andrew Sullivan, who doesn't even bother to offer his own analysis and would rather just jump up and shout, "Ooooh, me too, me too!", and then throw around phrases like "imperial temptation" and "US exploitation."
• The ever-cranky Steven Walt (also at FP), who does Sullivan one better by citing Jack Snyder's El Dorado myth, and finally
• the perennial FP doomsayer Tom Ricks*, who also outsources his response to a "old Afghan hand," a guy who was a Director of USAID in Afghanistan. In the 1970s. Well, he's certainly "old."

*Is it just me, or is Ricks' constant harping on the supposed "unraveling" in Iraq starting to sound like a guy hoping for a predicition to come true, regardless of the consequences? Things in Iraq are not good, but are ever so slowly getting better, but sometimes I think Ricks would prefer that the country falls apart so he can stand up and say "I told you so!"

Tomorrow, a sampling of some reactions from actual Afghans to the supposed news that their country holds impressive mineral wealth, along with a few thoughts of my own. In the meantime, there are plenty of more relevant, interesting and important articles in the NY Times recently. For examples, see here and here.

N.B. Apologies for the "wall of text" but I couldn't find a way to communicate the salient points in more concise language. Verbosity was always one of my faults.