So in 2013 Vice released a documentary on the deplorable state of the Afghan police and army even as the Obama Administration was trying to draw down US military commitment to the country and the war was fading from the news cycles, called This Is What Winning Looks Like. It's overall pretty good. There's a couple standout segments for me. The first is about halfway through, when the US ambassador and British deputy ambassador fly into a high-risk rural zone in helicopters with some Afghan government suits and a heavy escort, have a (photo op) briefing with the local US advisers, have a nice dinner with their elite friends, hear what they want to hear, and then spout some completely vapid platitudes to the cameras as they fly back out, having learned absolutely nothing about what's really happening on the ground.

The second is when a US advisor named Major Steuber - who the documentarians have been following through much of the film because he's blunt and honest about the challenges and setbacks facing this efforts - just goes on a quiet rant about all the various logistical problems that all add up to making all their efforts completely ineffective. It's a great sequence that goes to show just how much of a hollow house of cards American "nation-building" really is. The sequence starts at this timestamp, if you'd rather watch it. But I thought I'd transcribe it too.

Steuber: We've built this [patrol headquarters] here, you know we've got four towers and a generator and we've got a pump and gates and concertina wire. But, uh, [knocks on a fuel tank, it rings completely hollow] it's empty. There's no fuel here. And because of that, because of this simple logistical need, they can't get out. They've got 34 patrol bases from the southern Green Zone all the way to the northern Green Zone that they can't get out to. If there's anything that's out there that's going to really jeopardize the security here, it's not going to be a lack of fighting well. It's going to be something as simple as this: not having any fuel to be able to get anywhere.

S: Where the fuel comes into is Lashkar Gah, which is generally a two-hour drive away, and the southern part of the southern Green Zone there, known as the Page Area, is still controlled by the Taliban. SO you can't get a fuel truck up here. It's just too dangerous for them to bring that much fuel to try and come up here and refuel their tanks [and vehicles]. So what they do is they have to sell the fuel down there in Lashkar Gah. And they sell the fuel, and any time you start selling fuel or selling those types of things, you open the door for corruption to be able to enter into the process. And unfortunately this particular PHQ used to get about 20,000 liters every month. And the spigot has literally been turned off on them.

Documentarian: When the Afghan government announced that it was going to stop sending fuel down here they gave a figure of how much was stolen. How much was it?

S: I don't remember the number. It's nearly one million dollars worth of fuel. So whatever a million US dollars will buy in fuel.

D (in studio with Producer): The government in Kabul are saying that since the police are stealing so much fuel, we're no longer we're no longer going to give it to them. But there was a big fight the night before, and they couldn't get to it, because they had no petrol. And the thing is they just assumed that the Marines would bail them out and give them their petrol, which the Marines are now saying "It's not working like that anymore. You are on your own now."

P: So they've been stealing it for years and getting it off the Americans, and now the Americans have cut them off.

S: We had a long discussion with Sergeant Matine today about how somebody goes about getting a commission within the [Afghan National Police]. He said it costs about fifty thousand afghani, or about a thousand US dollars to be able to get the bribes paid in Lashkar Gah. And then it's another four thousand US dollars to get bribes paid within MOI in Kabul, to be able to get them into the academy. So, in order to become an officer, just become a basic lieutenant here, it costs five thousand dollars. So that's quite a steep price for an Afghan.

D: These are big issues. You think they can be resolved by the time we leave?

S: Um...no. No, not by that timeline. These are serious logistical issues. And the difference being that other militaries have educated people that are working very complex systems. And this is a very complex system. This right here, this generator is a very complex piece of machinery. They don't have the technical know-how to be able to operate this and run it. They don't have the systems or the operational know-how to be able to get fuel through a distribution center to be able to fill up this tank. I only have basically five months to teach them how to do this stuff. And then the next team's gonna to in, and then they're gonna learn the [Area of Operations] for another month. And then they're going to have their time here driving the bus, so to speak. And they still have to learn all this process and how it goes. So our actual amount of time that we have contact with them to be able to one, understand their system, and then to coach them through it and help them be able to request the supplies and be able to have a functioning logistical section, it's a complicated task for anybody. And it makes it even more complicated when you have a police force whose officers can't read or write. They can't communicate on paper, and I mean, if everything's done by cell phone there's no record-keeping. The system becomes wide open for corruption, exploitation.

S: I mean you look up on the building right there you can see the solar panels that are up there. But when you go up there and look at the solar panels, you see they're not really connected to anything. And when you ask them, "Well, where does this go? Who put this in here?" They can't answer those questions. They don't know how it works. And I've got policemen on my team. I've got an administrative officer. But I don't have any solar panel experts to be able to help them fix that out. So it's left to guys like myself and my team to try and figure out how to hook up solar panels and tie it into an electrical structure at a PHQ.

D [in studio]: The whole policy is designed as if everyone was educated, literate, there was a permanent police force there for years, as if the Taliban were no longer a problem, as if everybody wanted little girls to go to school. And it's all a fantasy for ten, twenty years down the road. None of the things that need to be in place now are anywhere near in place.

S: You know, that antenna right there, every time I walk by it, I think, if that's not a symbol for what we're trying to do here, I don't what is. I mean, it's a functioning radio tower. It's standing on its own. It's twisted and bent and held up with strings. But it's there, and it works. And hopefully it'll still be there after 2014.

D [in studio]: Pretty much every day there was a major blow to Major Steuber. Something really bad happened that he hadn't seen coming. In this case, there was a deputy police commander who he was sure had tortured detainees and had chai boys [child prostitutes] himself that everyone thought had been retired - y'know, politely fired. Suddenly, he appeared again on the base.

S: Anytime you think you've got this place figured out, something else'll come up around the corner that you weren't expecting. I had been assured by the DG, I had been assured by people at provincial [government] that that guy was going to be gone, that I wouldn't have to worry about him, that he was going to be prosecuted for crimes against the people of this country. But he's still here. Although he looks a bit more humble than he was a few days ago, he's still here. And I don't know what I'm going to do about that...

D: How does it work when people have very serious evidence stacked up against them and seem to somehow slip back into positions of power?

S: ...Um...I don't know. I don't know. I mean, the case on that guy is pretty open and shut, if you ask me. But apparently, somebody at MOI, somebody at provincial didn't think so, so he's back. I guess money talks...

I cut out a short part near the end where Steuber expresses some faint hope at how the district commander, Ghuli Khan, is back at the headquarters, saying how he might not be a saint, and might be of questionable competence, but he at least tries, and that's something. The documentarian then explains at the studio that a few weeks after the documentary was filmed, Ghuli Khan was unceremoniously fired from his post and replaced with an illiterate 24-year-old kid who knew the right people to pay in the provincial government.

This transcript ran long, so I'll cut it here and post a reply with an excerpt from The Shock Doctrine the contrast with this on how American "nation-building". Klein describes it in a way that struck me viscerally, and it when you pair it with little scenes like this one a whole picture of corruption and incompetence comes together.

  • LeninsRage [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    3 years ago

    Bold is emphasis mine.

    Bremer's vanguard participation in the homeland security industry was ideal preparation for Iraq. That's because the Bush administration used the same formula to rebuild Iraq that it had pioneered to respond to 9/11" it treated postwar Iraq as if it was an exciting IPO, brimming with free-wheeling, quick-profit potential. So while Bremer may have stepped on plenty of toes, his mission never was to win Iraqi hearts and minds. Rather, it was to get the country ready for the launch of Iraq Inc. Seen in that light, his early, much-maligned decisions have an unmistakable logical coherence.

    After replacing general Jay Garner as the top US envoy, Bremer spent his first four months in Iraq almost exclusively focused on economic transformation, passing a series of laws that together make up a classic Chicago School shock therapy program. Before the invasion, Iraq's economy had been anchored by its national oil company and by two hundred state-owned companies, which produced the staples of the Iraqi diet and the raw materials of its industry, everything from cement to paper and cooking oil. The month after he arrived in his new job, Bremer announced that the two hundred firms were going to be privatized immediately. "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands," Bremer said, "is essential for Iraq's economic recovery."

    Next came the new economic laws. To entice foreign investors to take part in the privatization auction and to build new factories and retail outlets in Iraq, Bremer enacted a radical set of laws described by The Economist in glowing terms as the "wish-list that foreign investors and donor agencies dream of for developing markets." One law lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 45 percent to a flat 15 percent (straight out of the Milton Friedman playbook). Another allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets - preventing a repeat of Russia, where the prizes went to the local oligarchs. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest, and they would not be taxed. The decree also stipulated that investors could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years and then be eligible for renewal, which meant that future elected governments would be saddled with deals signed by their occupiers. The one area on which Washington held back was oil: its Iraqi advisers warned that any move to privatize the state oil company or to lay claim to untapped reserves before an Iraqi government was in place would be seen as an act of war. But the occupation authority did take possession of $20 billion worth of revenues from Iraq's national oil company, to spend as it wished (*Some $8.8 billion of this money is often referred to as "Iraq's missing billions" because it disappeared into US-controlled Iraqi ministries in 2004, virtually without a trace...).

    The White House was so focused on unveiling a shiny new Iraqi economy that it decided, in the early days of the occupation, to launch a brand-new currency, a massive logistical undertaking. The UK firm De La Rue did the printing, and bills were delivered in fleets of planes and distributed in armored vehicles and trucks that ran at least a thousand times throughout the country - at a time when 50 percent of the people still lacked drinking water, the traffic lights weren't working, and crime was rampant.

    Although it was Bremer who implemented these plans, the priorities were coming straight from the top. Testifying before a Senate committee, Rumsfeld described Bremer's "sweeping reforms" as creating "some of the most enlightened - and inviting - tax and investment laws in the free world." At first, investors seemed to appreciate the effort. Within a few months, there was talk of a McDonald's opening in downtown Baghdad - the ultimate symbol of Iraq joining the global economy - funding was almost in place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side, HSBC, the international bank headquartered in London, was awarded a contract to open branches all over Iraq, while Citigroup announced plans to offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil. The oil majors - Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Russia's Lukoil - made tentative approaches, signing agreements to train Iraqi civil servants in the latest extraction technologies and management models, confident that their time would soon arrive.

    Bremer's laws, designed to create the conditions for an investor frenzy, were not exactly original - they were merely an accelerated version of what had been implemented in previous shock therapy experiments. But Bush's disaster capitalism cabinet was not content to wait for the laws to take effect. Where the Iraq experiment entered bold new terrain was that it transformed the invasion, occupation, and reconstruction into an exciting, fully privatized new market. This market was created, just as the homeland security complex was, with a huge pot of public money. For reconstruction alone, the boom was kicked off with $38 billion from the US COngress, $15 billion from other countries, and $20 billion of Iraq's own oil money.

    When the initial billions were announced, there were, inevitably, laudatory comparisons with the Marshall Plan. Bush invited the parallels, declaring the reconstruction "the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan," and stating in a televised addressed in the early months of the occupation that "America has done this kind of work before. Following World War II, we lifted up the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, and stood with them as they built representative governments."

    What happened to the billions earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction, however, bore no relationship to the history Bush invoked. Under the original Marshall Plan, American firms benefitted by sending equipment and food to Europe, but the explicit goal was to help war-torn economies recover as self-sufficient markets, creating local jobs and developing tax bases capable of funding domestic social services - the results of which are ine vidence in Germany's and Japan's mixed economies today.

    The Bush cabinet had in fact launched an anti-Marshall Plan, its mirror opposite in nearly every conceivable way. It was a plan guaranteed from the start to further undermine Iraq's badly weakened industrial sector and to send Iraqi unemployment soaring. Where the [post-WWII] plan had barred foreign firms from investing, to avoid the perception that they were taking advantage of countries in a weakened state, this scheme did everything possible to entice corporate America (with a few bones tossed to corporations based in countries that joined the "Coalition of the Willing"). It was this theft of Iraq's reconstruction funds from Iraqis, justified by unquestioned, racist assumptions about US superiority and Iraqi inferiority - and not mere the generic demons of "corruption" and "inefficiency" - that doomed the project from the start.

    None of the money went to Iraqi factories so they could reopen and form the foundation of a stable economy, create local jobs, and fund a social safety net. Iraqis had virtually no role in this plan at all. Instead, the US federal government contracts, most of them issued by USAID, commissioned a kind of country-in-a-box, designed in Virginia and Texas, to be assembled in Iraq. It was, as the occupation authorities repeatedly said, "a gift from the people of the United States to the people of Iraq" - all the Iraqi people needed to do was unwrap it. Even Iraqis' low-wage labor wasn't required for the assembly process because the major US contractors such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and the California-based engineering giant Parsons preferred to import foreign workers whom they felt confident they could control. Once again the Iraqis were cast in the role of awed spectators - first awed by US military technology and then by its engineering and management prowess.

    As in the homeland security industry, the role for the government employees - even US government employees - was cut to the bone. Bremer's staff was a mere fifteen hundred people to govern a sprawling country of 25 million. By contrast, Halliburton had fifty thousand workers in the region, many of them lifelong public servants lured into the private sector by offers of better salaries.

    US troops and contractor numbers in Afghanistan by year

  • Nakoichi [they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    You can hear defeat in that guy's voice all the way back in 2013

  • Yllych [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    It's a very interesting documentary

    Hearing that Steuber guy complain about the Afghan police abuse of the supply depots and payroll, I'm like dude that's the point. I think this view became especially prevalent in all the snivelling mea culpas that popped up recently. It's easy to blame Afghanis for being lazy and dumb for not buying into the war that we caused. The real blame ought to be on Colt , Smith & Wesson, Raytheon etc hand in hand with western governments: all who stood to make a profit by the adventures in the Middle East. The grift is not a special Afghani moral failing, rather it's been the whole unspoken point of the occupation, and who better to teach that than us. War is a racket.

    • LeninsRage [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      He wasn't actually necessarily blaming the Afghans for selling the fuel, he said they were essentially forced to sell off the fuel because it couldn't be safely distributed to the patrol posts, and that when you open the doors to that corruption essentially becomes inevitable and expanded.

      • Yllych [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        That's true I should clarify that I don't think Steuber is necessarily blaming them, I mean more broadly that blaming the Afghans has become an important media coping mechanism for the trauma of the defeat.