Afghanistan Times
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There is a ubiquitous pessimism regarding the performance of the National Unity Government. This ubiquity is validated by a survey carried out by a private news channel TOLOnews. A survey titled: Do you think your standard of living has improved under the National Unity Government, which has three options have garnered as many as 3952 votes. The three options are: “Definitely not. Slightly. And very much so.”
Appallingly the “definitely not” has received 3364 votes. It means 85.1 percent of the voters think their life definitely didn’t improve under the new government. “The slightly” category has received 304 votes and thus it makes 7.7 percent. Whereas the “very much so” category has grabbed 284 votes which makes 7.2 percent. There are too many reasons behind this pessimistic view. Two months back, the Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, said they have received a troubled legacy from the former administration. It was just a lie excuse to cover up the weaknesses of the current government. Governments nowhere around the world are perfect. Blaming former governments doesn’t resolve the issues on ground. In developed parts of the world, current governments try to learn from the mistakes of the former governments and come up with new approaches however here the story is quite otherwise. If someone thinks blaming others resolves the issues, then Afghanistan wouldn’t have even a single issue and crisis as we are masters in blaming others even for own mistakes. Corruption, nepotism, tribalism, ethnic-based favoritism, land grabbing, and many other social, political and economic evils are as rampant as they were in the past. However, in the new government a new curse has emerged and that’s the extreme deterioration of security. The security situation is becoming more and more dangerous as Pakistan has increased its support to insurgency in Afghanistan and the international community has wound up its combat mission and many nations have already pulled out their troops. It has given birth to security vacuum. It doesn’t mean our security forces don’t have the spleen to counter the security threats but yes they are less in numbers and lack proper equipment and training. And the reason is more and more dead bodies are coming from all sides. The number of our security troops killed just in one year is far higher than the United States lost during the past decade. If the government has any fix to this problem it should tell the nation. This is the high morale of our security forces that is the keeping the confidence of the general public that we are winning the war against the militants whereas other than it there is nothing on the ground that gives us hope and makes us believe that victory is ours. Opium production has reached a new high. Despite tens of billions of dollars spent, the war on drugs is showing little signs of developments. What could be more harassing than the fact that Afghanistan is becoming a forgotten story? John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), who was appointed by the US President Obama in 2012 to report corruption in a country in which some agencies make 80 percent of their payments in untraceable cash, but his recent interview posted on Youtube garnered only 106 views. For a country like Afghanistan, whose security not only guarantees security in the region but in the world, and man like Sopko who has been trying to mop up after a war that has cost American taxpayers over $1 trillion, this is really a smallest audience. And the reason is obvious—ubiquitous pessimism.
