Whatâs
Wrong Today:
The
situation on the ground in Afghanistan has become so uncertain that Afghan
diplomats no longer want to return to their homeland. Up to 100 foreign service
employees set for rotation back to Kabul from assignments abroad have now
defected or failed to report in back home.
From Der Spiegel: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
total of 105 Afghan diplomats were meant to report for duty at the Foreign
Ministry in Kabul on Saturday. They were being rotated out of their foreign
postings as scheduled, and it was time to return to headquarters. Yet just five of them have resurfaced.
The others have apparently remained in the countries where they had been
posted, among them several employees of the Afghan Embassy in Berlin.
Sources at
the Afghan Foreign Ministry told Der Spiegel that embassy staff members have said
they would apply for asylum in their respective host countries or at least
apply for an extension of their service abroad with Afghanistan until after the
presidential election in spring 2014:
about the future of our country by that point…
The NYT said about Afghani diplomats:
it comes to expressing confidence in Afghanistanâs future, many of the
countryâs diplomats seem to be voting with their feet when their tours of duty
end.
Der
Spiegel reports that many Afghan diplomats are the sons and daughters of
high-ranking politicians. They also say that international foundations and
organizations that organize educational trips and conferences for Afghans
abroad have also become more cautious recently. They know that more and more
trip participants will disappear and that several Afghan teachers never
returned from a trip organized recently by the German government.
From Tinko
Weibezahl, the head of the Kabul office of Germanyâs Konrad Adenauer
Foundation:
trend. In recent months some of our most qualified contacts have left the country.
The refugees are the highly educated, who were much more optimistic about the
future a year ago…
So it
seems that the story of the hopeful future of an Afghanistan that stands on its
own two feet, which is safe and peaceful and democratically governed, is just a story that the Obama
Administration is keeping out there for domestic consumption.
It seems
clear that many Afghans don’t believe it.
The NY Times reports that Omar Samad, a former
ambassador to Paris who is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation,
indicates that more than 60% of Afghan diplomats decide to remain abroad, and
the trend has been accelerating recently. Samad:
a huge brain drain…We have lost some of our best and most experienced diplomats
over the years.
Mr. Samad said that
when he was ambassador to Canada, only two of the seven diplomats posted in
Ottawa returned between 2004 and 2009, and that in Toronto, even fewer did.
While he was in Paris, from 2009 to 2011, two-thirds returned, he said.
The Times reports that the practice often begins
at the top, with ambassadors who leave their posts and do not return. A former
ambassador to Washington, Said Tayeb Jawad, joined a diplomacy project at
Harvard after his tenure ended in 2010 and then went to Johns Hopkins. Jawed
Ludin, a former ambassador to Canada, did return, to take up a post as deputy
foreign minister, but he resigned from the ministry this year to become an
executive for a Saudi firm, Anham, based in the United States.
Some Afghan
ambassadors have dual citizenship, making it easy for them to stay away â Mr.
Samad is also American, for example. Lower-level diplomatic staff members often
have to resort to going underground or applying for asylum, as many emigrants
from Afghanistan already do. The US State Department has started turning down
visa requests from Afghan diplomats to bring along their extended families,
like brothers, sisters and parents.
The diplomatic drain
parallels an effort by many Afghans to make sure they have a foothold abroad in
case things go badly after the Western military withdrawal, which is scheduled
to be completed
in 2014.
Western countries
have been barraged by visa applications from Afghans, and many who have been
stymied by the slow visa process, are resorting to seeking asylum. Since 2011,
according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more asylum seekers have left Afghanistan than any other
country, about 36,000 a year, and they have applied for permission to stay in
nearly all of the worldâs industrialized countries. The previous time when Afghan asylum requests were that high was in
2001, when the Taliban were in power.
The push for visas in
Afghanistan has led many smaller embassies to close their visa operations in
Kabul entirely. Dutch officials said they were forced to do so last year after
the embassy officer in charge of visa processing, Mary Sarwary, an Afghan, went
on a professional visit to the Netherlands and did not come back.
Itâs true everywhere and all the time that the 1% knows more than the rest of us,
even in Afghanistan.
The Afghan 1% knows
enough to get out while they can. Maybe they know a lot more than Mr. Obama, Mr.
Hagel and Mr. Karzai.
Or, could they just be
smarter?
It’s time to put our old Karzai up on blocks.
