Of Cart and Caddies

Anybody out there remember Afghanistan? You know, the country we invaded before Iraq (with an actual reason)? Well, things were picturesque there for about a month or so before everyone got so hopped up and excited on Iraq and neglected to try to fix Afghanistan. Well, now things are rearing their ugly head again. A story from the Washington Post describes the growing disconnect between the rich and poor in the nation.

Anyone who has studied world history probably knows that if a nation has a sizable portion of the population in severe poverty things get a bit testy and people start agitating for pretty radical things so they can get food on their table and a wallet with some weight to it. This is starting to become the case in Afghanistan. All of a sudden, a select few individuals (with either government, tribal milita, drug, or some combination of any of the three) are becoming increasingly wealthy as the country's poor are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the current system and are actually thinking about how things were during the Taliban era.

Much of this has to do with the government in place in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai has had little control beyond many of the "urban" "centers" of Afghanistan, and even that is questionable. While he should have some way of trying to combat the growing inefficiency and corruption, there's only so much he can do. Just look at Pakistan and its ability to try to rein in parts of its own nation. Afghanistan is essentially an entire nation made up of those rogue western parts of Pakistan.

At this point right now, the US is in poor shape to try to bail out Afghanistan, with the problems it already has with Iraq right now and trying to help establish Iraq's government/get the hell out of there in as good of a shape as possible. But even its assistance would have to be immediately effective in order to make any sort of headway; otherwise, it would look like the current regime is an American puppet, thus increasing the popularity of radical factions in Afghanistan in a manner reminiscent of Iran. There has to be more than monetary assistance poured into Afghanistan; people have got to spend some time there to supervise and run the infrastructure smoothly before the government itself can function properly. I mean, who cares if you don't have a democracy when you don't have food or shelter?