"Who's Watching Karzai?" Daily Beast Opinion Piece
If the Afghanistan “surge” and new comprehensive strategy are to succeed, we need to make sure civilian efforts are coordinated and thereby achieve maximum impact. This will ensure that we can apply collective international pressure on President Karzai, and that our resources achieve maximum effectiveness.
See: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-17/whos-watching-karzai/
A few excerpts :
“In his standard command briefing, Gen. Stanley McChrystal points out that he has no civilian counterpart. While he is working to coordinate the military efforts of NATO and non-NATO countries, to ensure unity of command and unity of effort, there is no civilian doing the same for the critical political and economic work being conducted by the countries participating in the stability operation in Afghanistan.
Why does this matter? For the last eight years, as several U.N. and U.S. officials told a visiting NATO delegation to Afghanistan in the fall, civilian efforts have not had the desired effect because they have not been properly coordinated. The funding and projects were devised and implemented with national interests or perspectives in mind, and have had less impact than they might have had together. Like raindrops, they drizzled, scattered, and left little mark; had they been channeled, they might have added up to a stream. Worse, of course, is the possibility that some efforts operated at cross purposes…..”
“If we are truly going to approach Karzai and his government intending to “change their behavior,” in White House press secretary Robert Gibbs’ words, we need to be able to apply pressure in a concerted fashion—not just on the military front. If we want to make sure that our money and civilian efforts are optimized and maximized, we need to get serious…”
We need one — strong — person in charge.
