A Deal With the Devil
By KATHLEEN McGOWAN
New York Times
Washington
IF consecutive suicide bombings aimed at the vice president of the United States and the American ambassador to Afghanistan weren’t dramatic enough illustration of the Taliban’s resurgence, President Hamid Karzai’s decision two weeks ago to swap five Taliban captives for a kidnapped Italian reporter, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, should make perfectly clear the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan.
The precedent that this trade establishes is as obvious as it is staggering in its implications. Taliban insurgents, international terrorists, opium traffickers and garden-variety criminals learned years ago that attacking foreign aid workers and journalists was the easiest and least costly way to keep rural Afghanistan, in particular the southern and southeastern areas along the border with Pakistan, both ungoverned and ungovernable.
The murder in 2003 of Ricardo Munguia, a worker with the Red Cross, was just the opening salvo in a campaign to intimidate the international community and the Karzai government. This strategy has been undeniably effective: successive attacks have led most major humanitarian organizations, the United Nations and many news media outlets to reduce their presence significantly or withdraw from the parts of Afghanistan where their contributions are most needed.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
Washington
IF consecutive suicide bombings aimed at the vice president of the United States and the American ambassador to Afghanistan weren’t dramatic enough illustration of the Taliban’s resurgence, President Hamid Karzai’s decision two weeks ago to swap five Taliban captives for a kidnapped Italian reporter, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, should make perfectly clear the disaster unfolding in Afghanistan.
The precedent that this trade establishes is as obvious as it is staggering in its implications. Taliban insurgents, international terrorists, opium traffickers and garden-variety criminals learned years ago that attacking foreign aid workers and journalists was the easiest and least costly way to keep rural Afghanistan, in particular the southern and southeastern areas along the border with Pakistan, both ungoverned and ungovernable.
The murder in 2003 of Ricardo Munguia, a worker with the Red Cross, was just the opening salvo in a campaign to intimidate the international community and the Karzai government. This strategy has been undeniably effective: successive attacks have led most major humanitarian organizations, the United Nations and many news media outlets to reduce their presence significantly or withdraw from the parts of Afghanistan where their contributions are most needed.
(Continued here.)
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