Wikileaks: More Than Just an Embarrassment
Jules Witcover

The perusal of WikiLeaks' massive dump of U.S. diplomatic cables has mostly focused on gossipy and indiscreet observations about foreign leaders. More notable are those that reflect an ever-broadening view of official corruption in Afghanistan, at a cost of billions of American taxpayer dollars.

The cables indicate this corruption continues to be at the core of the American effort to pursue the war there. It also has been a major negative in the nation building that has grown haphazardly out of the original rationale for the U.S. presence in that forlorn country.

At the center of the poisonous condition is Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose competence and trustworthiness has often been questioned in the cable traffic, and whose brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, governor of Kandahar, has repeatedly been linked to financial corruption and drug traffic.

One cable written after a meeting with AWK, as he is known, says that the challenge is "how to fight corruption and connect the people to their government when the key government officials are themselves corrupt."

President Karzai himself has contributed to the lack of confidence in the American diplomatic community with criticisms of the increasingly visible U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Particularly telling are cables by American Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, whose relationship with Karzai has been notably stormy.

Eikenberry cables in July 2009, recently reported in The Washington Post, characterized the Afghan president as two-faced. "The first is of a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with basics of nation-building," one cable said, "and overly self-conscious that his time in the spotlight of glowing reviews from the international community has past. The other is that of an ever-shrewd politician who sees himself as a nationalist hero who can save the country from being divided" by his political foes.

Other documents have discussed widespread embezzlement of funds intended for U.S.-bankrolled construction work in Afghanistan, including the building of numerous new military facilities and civic projects across the country.

All this negative publicity has countered cautiously optimistic reports on the war's progress from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan. It comes as Obama made a surprise visit to the country Friday and as he reassesses the strategy set late last year with the dispatch of 30,000 more U.S. troops there, now basically completed.

Administration sources have said the strategy remains on track for a start to American troop withdrawals next July, but with increasing emphasis from both Gates and Petraeus on a beginning only. At the recent NATO meeting in Lisbon, general agreement was voiced with Karzai's own prospective timetable of 2014 for withdrawal of all foreign forces in the collective effort to achieve a stable Afghanistan.

But all the reports of corruption give critics of the war and of continued American military and huge financial involvement in the country more grounds to press for an earlier resolution.

Obama's acquiescence in the last year's troop surge into Afghanistan came only after weeks of very public agonizing. In yielding to the generals, he left the clear impression then that the surge was to be one last try militarily to reduce the Taliban influence and combat remaining al-Qaida forces present by July 2011.

Ever since his election, the president has been haunted by his 2008 campaign pledge to get the United States out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Antiwar Democrats in Congress are likely to remind him anew of that pledge as that date approaches.

In the current climate of austerity at home and both public and Republican demands for major deficit-reduction, one obvious route would be declaring the Afghan engagement a qualified success next summer, and bringing the bulk of Americans home.

Such a decision, absent much greater progress in the war, would no doubt create a furor among defenders of the war. But polls continue to indicate most Americans believe the heavy U.S. commitment was a mistake. So ending it after a decade of sacrifice and frustration might be acceptable after all with voters desperate to turn more effectively to their own immediate problems.

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