Iran Press/America: "In 2009-10, the United States knows [that] it's failing in Afghanistan," Karl Eikenberry, a retired US Army lieutenant general, said on Friday. "The government is weak and fragile [so] they raise local militias for local security."
"It was a failure due to elite capture [of the new units by established corrupt interests.]"
US diplomats, military and civilian advisers all failed to understand the complexity of local political interests and power structures in Afghanistan and created worse criminality than existed when they went in, Eikenberry said.
"We created these security forces and they proved toxic and cancerous: ...They created more criminality and more narco-trafficking," he said. "We didn't have the local knowledge to do this."
Eikenberry and three other former US ambassadors co-authored a new USIP report, "Elite Capture and Corruption of Society," released on Friday, that used case studies from Afghanistan, Mexico, Uganda, and Ukraine to analyze the phenomenon of elite capture and examine how US assistance affected the dynamics of elite manipulation in those countries.
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