Listening to the news this morning, I couldn’t believe many people have the same thought about Afghanistan as I did – corruption! Some of them were even in government. How could we know that corruption destroyed any chance of giving the Afghans a viable country and not doing something about it? As I said in my last blog, we did precisely the same thing in Vietnam. However, we did much better with South Korea. They are a viable and prosperous country. How did we succeed in South Korea, and we didn’t succeed in Vietnam and Afghanistan?
I don’t know. I was pretty far down the chain of command, and I saw the problem and understood it in less than a month. I watched as a South Vietnamese MP on a checkpoint just outside of an American base demanded a chicken from a woman taking chickens to the market for sale. I didn’t understand enough Vietnamese at that point to understand what was going on. However, I could see the fear in the woman’s eyes and see she wasn’t willingly giving the chicken to the MP. Later, when I had learned enough Vietnamese, I saw the same thing. This time heard and understood what the MP was doing. At every level of government, someone was there with their hand outstretched, demanding money, a bribe.
I am sure you wouldn’t support a government that not only permitted bribes but expected their officials to live on them because they weren’t paid enough. The problem could easily be fixed by paying the officials enough money to live on and cracking down hard on anyone who demanded a bribe. The Afghan war went on for 20 years. It means that both political parties knew what the problems were and didn’t even attempt to fix them. With that said, I do not understand why all of our politicians ignored the problem of corruption. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are that dumb. They must’ve had a reason. What was it, or better yet, what is it? Write the politicians who represent you and ask them why they ignored the obvious. I haven’t gotten a reply. Perhaps, you will.
