I read the Reuters article yesterday and felt really bad. There are some news stories which hit hard and change people's minds or make them up; this is one of them. I live in the epicenter of Liberal Northern California. Berkeley is down the road and the gay pride parade across the bay a couple weeks ago was streamed live. But there are women here walking around in full burkas. Topless lesbian motorcyclists and muslims who cannot show their faces in public. That seems strange but is it really compared to a country where opium is the national crop, the police are boy raping strong arm thugs, and we as occupiers have been fighting longer than world war I, II and Korea combined? We are losing soldiers and burning up millions in resources for what? WHAT? Somebody explain it to me or I am going to call the helicopters and bring everyone home.

The old saying, "you get what you pay for" holds true here.

Since the corrupt Karzi government saw no need to pay an adequate wage: whenever the Germans graduated an Afghani policeman, he immediately joined the Taliban or drug/war lords, because they pay better than the government in Kabul - leaving only the dregs that are, and have been part of the problem.

Like I said, the bad guys got what they paid for.

Can you feel the pain Alexander the Great felt when he took an arrow in the leg while on campaign there?

What we are explicitly fighting is the return of the Taliban and, with it, a Salafi Islamist organisation like al Qaida. To do this, we are relying on the installation of institutions that we understand: principally, a judicial system which includes a strong police component. Unfortunately, these are not institutions that the average Afghani places much confidence (as pointed out by the Reuters article). Given the Warlord history of Afghanistan, to install a modestly uncorrupt judicial system that the average Afghani has confidence in is something that isn't going to happen easily. I -suspect- rather that government positions, even if reasonably well paid, are frequently looked upon as sinecures through which an individual can enrich himself. A better short-term strategy might be to work with whatever local institutions really fulfil this role in Afghan society. This is likely counter intuitive to our military, as it would rather deal with some central authority rather than drink cups of tea with some local Imam. In any case, I doubt that the American, British and German peoples will support this effort much longer, so I personally think that we should be looking at alternatives.

this thing is a disaster. we don't know anything about this place. it's really sad that we don't implement changes until the disaster is about to occur. i agree with the last comment. we should be working on a local level and providing security to whatever traditional political structure we are able to find. if that doesn't work, or if there is no way to find legitimate local organizations to secure the country in our interests, we should leave. these new, american backed institutions like the police are failing by all accounts. the idea that we can build these centralized institutions so that Afghans will accept them is a stretch. the idea that it can be done while the Taliban are running most of the country is absurd.

in Graham Green's The Quiet American..."wish there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry."

So in the end after the strikes and after the surge to whom do we approach ...Certainly it is not to those young Afghan boys.

. . . case where you need to change a group's behavior?

You rearticulate the rules in terms congruent with the basic values of the culture in question (I imagine the Koran has something to say against pederastic rape, implicitly if not explicitly?).

Then you establish some pretty harsh penalties and enforce them thoroughly.

This is what the US did when we had a problem with kidnapping in the 1930s, eg.

I'm generally not a huge fan of the death penalty, but a culture of coerced rape of young boys sounds like sufficiently horrid to justify almost any effective response.

GaryC,

"These people" were actually moving towards women's rights and eradication of tribal custom when your government paid the Saudis and Pakistani's to return them to a version of "Islam" most Muslims don't recognise. After all jihadi Islam is better than communism, right?

All parents object to their children being raped. You can make disgusting jokes about toasting marshmallows and place the blame on politics and religion- I will not try to correct either one of you. I want my soldiers to come home and my tax dollars to stop going over there. Now.

. . . I'm happy to keep reading your posts.

But, it seems to me you aren't interested in fighting these wars better, you're only interested in getting out, damn the consequences.

At the same time you want to assert things about these wars that you think make it all the more imperative and obvious that we need to get out, but you don't really want to discuss the merits of those assertions.

And you want to post your demands that we get out, "Now," in a forum where they can have exactly zero effect.

None of which makes particular sense to me, but each to his own. It's still a free-ish country so if Ricks is happy to host you, I'm in no place to complain.

It seems like none of you are looking at this in perspective. Incidents of police abuse like this are fairly common in South Asia. But it's not like police do nothing but going around raping or stealing; there is a pervasive level of abuse, and occasional flareups, and hence a body of anecdotes and urban legends. This is not what causes insurgencies, or rather, fixing it is not a particularly important step towards tamping down the current insurgency.

The high water mark of police abuse, at least in my recollection, was in the 1980's in India when prisoners were deliberately blinded by prison guards, using acid. These things happen, but rarely affect the main flow of events.

In the Afghan case, the main flow of events is to not let Islamist extremists get a foothold. It's fine as a tactic to split off moderate Taliban and mainstream them, but the hardcore ones need to be defeated and killed.

Please