Quote Originally Posted by George L. Singleton View Post
Mike:

In Afghanistan and Pakistan,where in years past I lived and served, the practice of "backshees" [my phonetic spelling???] is that all, everyone, gets pay offs and kick backs for and from whatever they do vocationally.

This said, and it is true, how do you or we differentiate between everyday grassroots corruption and high level corruption, which corruption is true on all sides, the non-Taliban governance officials as well as the Taliban?

More critique, disagreement, whatever on this topic could be helpful to one and all as the advertised effort to clean up corruption to me seems highly unlikely to be achievable due to these folks hundreds of years of precedent of instutitionalized corruption, corruption as defined by a Westerner, job security and old age pension set asides as defined by locals over there from bottom to top.
George,

It took four tours to the Middle East to absorb what you are saying and comprehend the true limits of my own abilities as a ground force commander. My initial questions were intentionally weighted to encourage response and debate amoung other members of the council. I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one that has been in such a dilemma.

With that said, on the ground level, when one is supposed to "control" their environment while working within the constraints of indigenous culture, to include bribery, pay-offs, kick-backs, and simple corruption, I would suspect that a commander must determine an appropriate acceptable level.

When the local government surpasses the norm, actions must be taken. For example, in Diyala, Iraq (circa 2006-2007) Iraqi Army and local police units were being used by the elected government to cleanse the Sunni populace. Simultaneously, the Sunnis sided with al Qaeda as to check the government. Both sides were wrong- they were embattled in a civil war.

We were simply trying to maintain the peace.

I suppose that is what makes these examples interesting- Americans intervening in internal affairs trying to provide a least-bad solution.

I'm not sure if this applies to Afghanistan, but my intuition tells me that many of the issues in Afghan are Mullah Omar v/s Harmad Karzai.

With that, I'll wait for y'alls response.

v/r

Mike