Responding to a critic

Gregg Willhauck wrote a fairly angry response to my recent post on his survey of Afghan business people. He had a right to be angry – it was a pretty biting post and I admit that I went a bit over the top. I will stand my ground, however in the policy criticism. That is what I meant to do and I accept I did not make that as clear as I could have in the post. Let me be clear about what I meant to say.

First, I do not believe that the US needs to be engaging business people at this point. The absolute best thing the US can do to help Afghan business people is to improve security in Afghanistan. A recent GAO report makes clear that the security situation is deteriorating and that all the development projects in the world won’t make a difference as long as there is no security.

Second, I will stand by my tongue-in-cheek suggestion that ISAF’s use Wali Karzai’s private security firm is an example of working with Afghan business people – because it directly focuses on security. This was a harsh criticism, but a valid one. ISAF will never gain control of Kandahar without Karzai’s support. At the moment, Karzai is deliberately keeping the Afghan police in Kandahar weak so ISAF will need to rely on his incompetent private security guards. Thus, not only is the person that ISAF needs to secure Kandahar ripping off ISAF, he is making the security situation worse.

Third, my point about red tape was not that this is what the survey finds. My point was that we don’t need surveys to tell us that people in Afghanistan want security.

I agree that my tone in the post was biting, but I have been – and will continue to be – a harsh critic of policies in Afghanistan that do not seem to me to be contributing to improving security. I did not mean to attack Willhauck or the survey. I meant to attack a policy that thinks it is important to survey business people in the middle of a war.