Afghanistan presents a tangled and thorny policy quandary. But there’s a quick reference tool available to gauge the deluded, self-defeating nature of the USdominated Western intervention— that big-dollar, faint-hearted alliance that has found itself lost and groping for landmarks in a land where warfare has reigned uninterrupted for a full 30 years, since the outbreak of civil war in April, 1978.

Just go to the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s Web site (www.usdoj.gov/dea) and click on “Major International Fugitives.” See any Afghan faces, the big Khans of global heroin trafficking? No, it’s mostly just coke-pushing Columbians. Don’t bother clicking on “Captured Fugitives,” either: the heroin Khans are nowhere in evidence.

So we’re led to believe that with all the resources deployed in Afghanistan by the United States military, its intelligence services, and the State and Justice departments (including one of the DEA’s largest overseas operations), there are simply no leads on the ringleaders of the industry that accounts for 93 percent of the world’s heroin trafficking— the mother of all mother loads of raw drug stock, opium, a crop so immense that by the State Department’s own reckoning, Afghanistan’s 2007 harvest, if all the poppy resin were refined into heroin, would produce a commodity worth upwards of $40 billion.

“Of course we know who the big men are in heroin,” says one weary agent of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. “The Americans, too— we discuss the structure of these gangs, the people who handle the drugs and those in high office who protect them.

“But we cannot act. The heroin culture is our power structure, it’s that simple. It is our curse, our downfall.”

Onto this landscape of corruption and official denial lands John Manley’s “Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan,” report, followed swiftly by even bleaker assessments by US, European and United Nations inquiries. All speak of a global initiative that is failing.

Worse, the NATO governments confronted by these assessments appear unequal to the task of tackling the key contributing factors of the crisis. Having deceived themselves and their respective publics for so many years, they are unable to devise new strategies to rescue the Afghan project from spiralling further into the abyss.

Canadians, for example, are led to believe that the biggest urgency revealed by the Manley report is the need to muster another 1,000 troops. Meanwhile the Harper government takes no steps whatsoever to address the real weaknesses: the misguided US command-and-control effort; chaos and corruption in the Western-sponsored Karzai regime; and the Taliban leadership’s continuing holiday in the borderlands of Pakistan, from where they coolly and efficiently plot the killing of Afghan civilians— and Canadian soldiers.

Certainly the Manley report has levelled a good deal of blistering criticism on these fronts. The US-dominated NATO/ISAF command suffers “damaging shortfalls,” notably a “top heavy command structure,” which displays “an absence of a comprehensive strategy.” In the Western-sponsored Karzai regime, “corruption is widespread,” and its workings are “characterized by cronyism, bribery and a variety of shakedown enterprises managed by government officials.”

The regime’s corruption is “undermining not only the hope for an Afghan solution but also support for the Western forces sacrificing their lives.” On Pakistan, the panel emphasizes a grim truth that has been concealed by President Bush, Prime Minister Harper and other Western leaders: “Taliban commanders who are responsible for the violence in Afghanistan are directing it primarily from sanctuaries in Pakistan.”

At the same time, the review process is critically flawed— though not by its own conduct or content, but by the political atmosphere into which it falls. Debate in Ottawa over the Afghanistan mission distracts the nation with the crass, ill-informed parry and thrust of party politics at its lowest. Consequently, even while the Manley pages cry out for better communications and a greater emphasis on reconstruction, the ruling elite in Ottawa actively disinforms the public by directing its parliamentary paroxysms squarely on the combat mission— and a perversely mischaracterized version of that undertaking to boot.

Contributing to the confusion are Canada’s leading newspapers, news agencies and networks, whose managements stubbornly refuse to staff and report the Kabul regime or Pakistan sanctuaries stories. One reporter who recently returned from Kandahar comments: “Forget the larger picture, we’re not even staffing the Canadian Forces story properly. Just count the number of reporters and photographers on the ground at KAF (Kandahar Air Field). They’re down from last year, way down.”

As a result, Canadians hear and see the Afghanistan story mainly in the context of parliamentary debates, those confusing tangles of hyperbole that have done so much to sap understanding of our country’s Afghan mission. Meantime, scant attention has been paid in Canada to the Karzai regime’s continuing lurch towards disintegration— despite the increasing frequency of President Karzai’s public meltdowns and tantrums.

Especially with his obdurate refusal to accept British diplomat Paddy Ashdown as the UN’s new Afghan envoy (a slap in the face for the Harper government, which backed Ashdown), Karzai has lost his fashionista aura, that image, carefully crafted by his US sponsors, of the valiant statesman struggling to realize his peoples’ destiny. He now resembles little more than the evidence on the ground in Kabul has long suggested: a weak and unimaginative leader succumbing to the bilious corruption of many of his closest allies and appointees; a small man who is losing his grip not only on power, but on reality, too.

This became alarmingly obvious in Karzai’s emotional outbursts in January over the Ashdown appointment. For months, Karzai had been at odds with London over British attempts to woo Taliban commanders off the battlefield in Helmand province. Sources close to the president’s US advisors point to a much larger fear on Karzai’s part— that the arrival in Kabul of a policy pragmatist of Ashdown’s stature would mark the beginning of the end of the Karzai family’s hold on power. That threat haunts not only Hamid, but also his brashly acquisitive brothers Qayuum, Mahmood and Ahmed Wali— three men who have latched onto the internationally financed aid initiative and turned it into Afghanistan’s foremost family enterprise of wealth creation and influence peddling.

Ashdown, for his part, has been darkly philosophical about Karzai’s stance. After all, the Afghan leader is a politician facing an election campaign next year. Ashdown commented: “I suppose he must have calculated that beating up on Britain— an ex-imperial power— beating up on the United States, was not going to do him any harm in a proud Afghanistan amongst the Pashtun vote.”

That ethnic Pashtun voting block, the same community preyed upon by the Taliban for support in the south, is the unwieldy burden weighing down the caravan of ill-conceived stratagems that constitutes the US-led campaign in Afghanistan. Washington and its allies have consistently promoted Pashtun notables, stacking Karzai’s cabinet and ministries with them. But too many of them have served only their personal interests, following the lead of expatriate Afghan entrepreneurs more focused on building bank accounts in Dubai, rather than assisting the reconstruction of their homeland.

A dangerous political backlash to this US-fostered imbalance is gathering momentum in the form of the United Front, dominated by non-Pushtun former guerrilla communities, notably the northern Tajik followers of Ahmed Shah Massoud. While the Lion of the Panjshir is nearly seven years dead, murdered by al-Qaeda suicide bombers, the beacon of his dream of a united, nationalist Afghanistan still burns fiercely in the hearts of his people. While the United Front remains, itself, a deeply fractious entity, something much more threatening has accompanied its emergence: the re-arming, by its constituent elements, of private militias across the north of Afghanistan.

Half a world away, the Karzai regime’s richest sponsor sleepwalks toward oblivion. The Bush administration continues to encourage public ignorance of Afghanistan: most Americans still believe Hamid Karzai is that neat guy in the lambswool hat and cloak who speaks good English. Occasionally the Republican and Democratic hopefuls make a side-reference to Afghanistan, but only to slight the accident-prone incumbent. This 2008 campaign confirms once again that creating understanding just doesn’t cut it on US election trails.

Contrast that with the advice of DC’s straight talkers. An assessment co-chaired by retired Marine Corps General James Jones and former UN Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering has stated that Afghanistan risks becoming a failed state and a forgotten war. The review cited weakening international resolve and a mounting skepticism among Afghans about their country’s future.

Was this report, released just a week after the Manley document, a muchneeded wake up call? Perhaps, but few, if any, decision-makers in American governance— or the media— appear to be stirring. Witness the latest incredible chapter in the saga of Zalmay Khalilzad, the undisputed Khan of policy blowback in Afghanistan, a man entirely deserving of his reputation among experienced observers as Washington’s man with the molten gun.

This past January, when Hamid Karzai went ballistic at the Davos summit over the Paddy Ashdown appointment, the diplomatic rumour mill began grinding out an astonishing prospect: that the smooth-talking Afghan-American academic-turnedstatesman, “King Zal” Khalilzad, the Bush administration’s former ambassador to Kabul and Baghdad, and currently its representative to the UN, was considering standing for the office of president of Afghanistan in 2009.

Leading US newspapers and magazines duly reported the story, and managed to do it straight-faced. Newsweek, for example, stated: “Khalilzad had a successful stint as US ambassador to Kabul after the Taliban fell, helping to form the Karzai government and working with then Maj. Gen. David Barno, commander of US forces, to pacify the country.”

Successful? Pacify? What about the assessment done in early February by US Marine Corps chief General James Conway, that violence in Afghanistan has escalated because the Pentagon lacks a clear picture of Afghanistan. “It is a bit confusing at this point,” Conway stated, “because we as a department need to see it the same way and quite frankly, at this point in time, we just don’t.” So where was the administration’s chief Afghan diplomat as this confusion persisted? Still actively involved from his post in New York, according to European officials familiar with the US command structure.

Regarding Khalilzad’s past, Newsweek was not alone in failing to recount the salient facts. Specifically, that when the record is searched for US officials who supported the most suspect Afghan commanders of the 1980s— those who’ve become the leading anti-American militants of today— Khalilzad tops the list. As well, he helped deepen Washington’s reliance on Pakistan’s notoriously self-serving military intelligence service, the ISI, which nurtured and continues to support the Taliban. Khalilzad advocated US recognition of the Taliban regime in the 1990s, while helping to promote UNOCAL’s trans-Afghan oil pipeline project. And as the Bush administration’s ambassador to Kabul, he stacked the Karzai cabinet with ethnic Pashtuns, marginalizing Tajiks to the extent that, even at Karzai’s presidential palace, one insider condemns Khalilzad as “an ethnic fascist.”

Good presidential material? Hardly. As for Khalilzad’s management of the Afghan reconstruction effort, his record of advancing the careers of grasping Afghan Americans loyal to the Bush administration speaks volumes (see Policy Options, “Cashing In On Karzai & Co,” November, 2007) According to one Western diplomatic source with years of experience in Kabul: “A few of us have been asking one another if we know of a more divisive or domineering figure on the political scene hereabouts. The only names we came up with are big militia leaders, or religious or ethnic supremacists.

“Even a lot of Pashtuns laugh at the suggestion of Zal as a candidate for elected office here. After all, the country now faces the real threat of disintegration along ethnic and regional lines. Khalilzad helped strengthen those fault lines, not ease them.”

Aid specialists point to today’s alarmingly ineffective global assistance effort as further evidence of the drawbacks of the Bush administration’s domineering style. The group ActionAid accuses donor nations of “following an inconsistent and incoherent approach.” ActionAid says the donors have failed to deliver a full $5 billion of aid pledged, “despite finding the many hundreds of billions necessary for military operations.”

A total of $16 billion in aid has reached Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001. Even some of Karzai’s own administrators warn that the distorted, ineffectual channelling of foreign assistance is contributing to, rather than relieving, disaffection among the Afghan civilian population. One presidential aide in Kabul says: “The whole process is skewed in favour of foreigners and westernized Afghans, the donor/consultant elite. Aid isn’t going through appropriate channels, and it’s not reaching the people of Afghanistan. Much of it goes in big administration, security, and salary costs for foreigners, and for their westernized Afghan partners and interlocutors.

“These people, particularly Afghan-Americans who’ve built up large offshore holdings, take advantage of a weak system. That system is nearing breaking point. There’ll be a strong backlash from the Afghan people, in the provinces and here in Kabul. That could prove to be the final disaster: a collapse of order, not just trust.”

This grim assessment, like much of the Manley report, is sharply at odds with the mainly reassuring statements that have come from the Harper government over the past two years. The PMO has only depicted the Karzai administration in an upbeat way and, according to sources at Foreign Affairs, he has instructed senior diplomats at the Canadian embassy in Kabul to discourage candid news coverage of the regime by Canadian journalists.

The Manley panel delicately suggests a “rebalancing” of the government’s communications practices, saying it “must engage Canadians in a continuous, frank and constructive dialogue.” In other words, it’s time to quit blowing smoke over the critical weaknesses of the Afghan mission.

Question: what good is quitting the smoke while cyclones of official denial continue to spin and churn?