I鈥檓 frankly tired of writing about Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. One of the reasons, in fact, that I鈥檓 tired of writing about Afghanistan is that it so often involves writing about horrible people and how the US has empowered them. So AWK鈥檚 slaying on July 12th is interesting to me more for the chance it offers to discuss a fatal error in American strategy, one that goes far beyond the Afghan war.
What鈥檚 important for the US and Afghanistan going forward is the trope of destabilization that has occurred in a lot of discussion, both professional and popular, of the slaying of Kandahar鈥檚 Al Capone. We hear that with the elimination of one powerbroker, Kandahar will be less stable. This theme also occurs in analysis of the revolutions of the Arab Spring. If Saleh or Assad falls, the pundits wonder, will Yemen or Syria be less stable?
The assumptions embedded in these discussions are, to me, part of the reason the US is committing foreign policy suicide in any number of countries. In fact, Afghanistan is just about the only country where American policymakers don鈥檛 think that a broad array of competing factions and dissenting opinions is dangerous.
We are making a terrible intellectual mistake. Stability is what happens when everything else works鈥攚hen you have free markets and free people. It鈥檚 the political equivalent of happiness, which Aristotle astutely pointed out is the result, not the goal, of a life well lived. Live virtuously and actively and you may end up happy, if you have good luck. The same more or less goes for nations with respect to stability.
In Afghanistan, we鈥檝e compounded this philosophical mistake by pouring in huge amounts of American money, often badly monitored. We鈥檝e increased the spoils and raised the stakes in a society that lacks the rule of law and has lost much of its traditional cohesion. Small wonder that violence has relentlessly increased, with hundreds of tribal elders murdered just in Kandahar in recent years in conflicts exacerbated by competition for American contracting and security money.
The US has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Afghanistan, rewarding the worst people in Afghanistan, discouraging most people with any sense from entering public life, and increasing violence in just about every area of the country. What鈥檚 worse, our military and political leadership has been relentlessly dishonest about the situation, claiming imaginary successes as violence relentlessly grows.
General David Petraeus鈥檚 on Ahmed Wali Karzai鈥檚 killing was a triumph of hypocrisy: 鈥淧resident Karzai is working to create a stronger, more secure Afghanistan, and for such a tragic event to happen to someone within his own family is unfathomable.鈥�
As Petraeus knows full well, those who live by the sword die by the sword. Ahmed Wali Karzai鈥檚 killing鈥攍ike those of the hundreds of local elders murdered under his reign in Kandahar鈥攊s far from 鈥渦nfathomable.鈥� It is the predictable result of a struggle for money and power that we have foolishly stoked. And nothing the general, or anyone else in our government, has said gives hope that we will end our destabilizing quest for 鈥渟tability.鈥�