The Danger of Funding Thugs
Joshua Foust on May 20 2008 at 5:35 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Notes on the war
Sure it’s nice when you pay them to pretty please stop attacking us, but what of the consequences? This is the dark side of the CLC/Sons of Iraq/Awakening bandwagon we jumped on, and it’s one I’ve been mocked repeatedly for not letting go of.
But doing business with the gunmen, whom the U.S. military has dubbed Sons of Iraq, is like striking a deal with Tony Soprano, according to the soldiers who walk the battle-blighted streets, where sewage collects in malodorous pools.
“Most of them kind of operate like dons in their areas,” said 2nd Lt. Forrest Pierce, a platoon leader with the 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment. They shake down local businessmen for protection money, seize rivals for links to the insurgency and are always angling for more men, more territory and more power.
For U.S. soldiers on the beat, it means navigating a complex world of shifting allegiances, half-truths and betrayals.
Or we can call them what we do in Afghanistan: warlords.
Here is something darker to think about. In 1838, during the first of what would be three disastrous invasions over the next century, the British Empire thought it a great idea to pay off the various tribal chiefs of Afghanistan to keep them from attacking British supply and communications lines. By 1842 the gold had run out, and by 1843, the British suffered one of their most humiliating defeats as the tribes united in fury and killed them all save one (William Brydon, look him up).
The exact dynamic is at play in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, we hire Taliban sympathizers—more accurately called “those who are so poor they can be hired as fighters by Taliban and related militant groups”—to build roads at a rate just above the going day rate for a warrior. We offer them this carte blanche, just as we do in Iraq, and so long as they promise to work for us, we promise to give them an income.
This is the worst sort of dependency. It does nothing to address the long term stability issues in Iraq (or Afghanistan), just as it does nothing to ensure we can ever scale down our largess without fear of catastrophe. Welcome to our new strategic masterminds.
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