There is a quote I seem to remember from Vietnam days which went some thing like this, “It’s a lousy war, but it is the only one we got.”

Listening to the Army leadership, they too appear to have written off Afghanistan. SMA Chandler is on a quixotic quest to turn the Army into true warrior-monks with his focus on getting rid of the "dirtbags," ramping up the PT standards, and telling us what to wear on our own time.

In a way this is worse than Vietnam as we're not even bothering to wait for the end of the war to begin the purge and bitter recriminations.

With all due respect, the US put paid to that Afghanistan by supporting the Mujahideen (remember when Jihad and jihadis were a good thing?), the most retrograde groups in Afghanistan, against the Communist government in Kabul. Bad as the Communists were--killing thousands if not tens of thousands of class enemies in Pul e Chakhri and other places--they were still determined to drag Afghanistan into, if not the 20th, then the late 19th century at least.

Pakistan would have probably supported the Mujahideen anyway--most of whom were on its payroll since the mid-1970s-- but there is a good chance that Zia's government would have stayed quiet. And there is nothing substantial the Mujahideen would have been able to achieve in Afghanistan against a Soviet backed Communist regime.

And as _B_has (correctly) pointed out, the US failed in A'stan because its generals were not able to figure out how to conduct an imperial occupation. It's really helpful to have some competent sepoys (assuming one doesn't have enough troops of ones own to commit--I think the Hazara would have happily enlisted in the Hazara Native Infantry if it gave them a chance to kill Pashtuns; would also have been a good idea to raise the Uzbek Lancers and the Tajik Guides to counterbalance the Hazara) and a halfway competent administration run by one's own people (call them advisors or administrators, as long as they make the decisions). Needless to say, Karzai and his brother would have been Uncle Sam's guest at Pul e Charkhi a long time ago.

Barring this, which is of course completely undoable for the US, if for no other reason than the fact that Petraeus is the only general who I've heard who appears smart enough to figure this out. Much of the rest of the US senior officer corps appears to bear out a comment I heard in the mid-1980s which was to the effect that West Pointer's SAT scores and GPAs wouldn't get them admitted to a middlingly competitive college, much less a really good school.

Barring this, of course, the US should have gotten the hell out of Afghanistan by about 2004 or so.

Yes, of course the Russian interlude and the US response to the Russian interlude brought the Daoud era to a close.

But seeking to move Afghanistan back to the relatively simple political equilibrium of the 1960s early 70s was a far smaller stretch than the goals the USG actually set:

* democracy
* transparency and accountabilty
* anti-courruption
* full engagement of women in the institutions of governance
* a large national army
* a large national police force
* etc

The "restoration" track would not have called for political skills that did not exist in Afghanistan. It would have accepted the moderate levels of corruption that have prevailed in all previous Afghan eras. It would have required a small army which the Northern Alliance warlords could have built largely without US assistance.

General Dostum did not need Dyncorp to train his troops. Afghanistan would not have required any national police force (the very idea runs counter to the essence of Afghan tradition).

Six months into our Afghan campaign in 2001/02 we had set the preconditions for the "restoration" track. An additional six months to support the northern Alliance victors in forming a simple Kabul Government accompanied by a modest dose of material assistace would have launched the new venture. We could have been out by end '02.

Would everything have been perfect? No. It wasn't perfect in 1965, either. Afghanistan is not a natural center of perfection.

But we would have had a more or less successful outcome of a genuine "small war" and the Afghans would have returned to being Afghans.

We might have found it useful to bomb an Al Quaeda camp (or three) with carrier-based assets in first year or two, but nothing much messier than that would have been necessary to get most of what we needed and most of what most Afghans wanted.

In ten years of grim, costly and bloody warfare we have achieved none of our grand goals. We have, however, moved the Afghan view of the US from one of moderate disdain to one of enduring hatred.

Having made a hash of the last decade, the best argument for getting out now is that nothing we "accomplish" in one more year, three more years, or five will endure. The forces we train will come unglued. Nobody will pay the recurring costs of the civil and military establishments we think we have built. The computers we have placed in the ministries will break down. The equipment in the clinics we have built will lanquish from neglect.

The Afghanistan we leave in 2014 or 2016 will become the same Afghanistan we could leave in 2012.

We had an initial glorious six months followed by an ever deepening decade of downward spiral towards failure.

It is time to face reality.

Sorry but I have to disagree. The 'restoration' would have had to be the staus quo ante Taliban. A new Northern Alliance government that would have been as bad/dangerous/corrupt/vicious as the old one in the 1990s that was removed by the Taliban. It would not have been a restoration of the Daoud Shah regime, much less the Zahir Shah one.

IIRC the US vetoed the return of Zahir Shah--which many Afghans actually wanted precisely because of the reasons you gave--but its doubtful that a Zahir government would have been any more competent than a Karzai one. I suppose its possible that Zahir Shah might have given the US the legitimacy necessary to implement a full-colonial policy (with say a 10 year withdrawal date) but this was not something the US was/is willing or able to do.

I don't think there were any 'good' options in Afghanistan other than to leave it as soon as possible--with or without Bin Ladin. In 2001-02 the US could have easily sent in troops to Pakistan to hunt bin Ladin down but chose not to. The Pakistanis certainly weren't going to risk a fight with the US then.

I could not agree more and I would have expected better from the intelligence community. At the time you put forward your concept, there wasn't a general who knew what you were talking about. In theory, you shouldn't have had to pitch the military as there is no reason that they should have been in a position to determine or help determine US policy. However, even if your audience had been State Department and CIA Afghan hands who understood; they still would have had to try and sell it to the arrogant ignoramuses: Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush.

I watch various court TV programs and have learned that if the court finds in your favor; the only obligation the court places on the defendant is "to make the defendant whole." To return the complainant to the condition they were in prior to the accident, theft, damage, whatever. In other words, "restoration." There is no obligation to create them anew or to make them better off. In effect, we embarked upon attempting to change their customs and mores because everyone understands and seeks democracy. They forgot Voltaire's "The best is the enemy of the good."

You are so right. We should have supported their traditional forms of local government and helped install a small, austere central government. The only thing that you may not have addressed and I have no answer for is what does one do about Pakistan? Remember that we permitted an alleged "50" Pakistan advisors (ISI) to fly out of Kabul prior to the Northern Alliance forces entering. Recently it has been suggested that the number was much higher than 50. Were we to have implemented your concept, what would Pakistan have done? There is a chance that they would have reintroduced the Taliban into Pashtun areas - at the minimum. Then we might have had to adequately equip the central government to resist any further incursion by the Taliban.

On Sunday I heard Senator Lindsey Graham say that we could still "win" in Afghanistan if blah blah. Other Senators were quoted in the NY Times with similarly ignorant statements. Someone is selling these guys and the White House a bill of goods. And they are doing this while looking for a mythical ground combat enemy in the Pacific. Maybe that will justify some shiny new vehicles.

Say what you will about Iraq, but at least people cared about it. If Iraq was Vietnam, then Afghanistan is Korea - forgotten to all but those who served there.

sf Thomas Drake as an example of what happens in Obama's new, more open America.

It's really very difficult to understate the influence of elected officials on foreign and domestic policy.

The Military Industrial Congressional Complex. The Congress folks, as holders of the purse, make all this possible. Of course, they are giving their financial backers and some of their constituents what they want.

Whenever I hear about Congressmen pushing for interventions in some place, perhaps spurred on by interest groups or lobbies, I'm always reminded of a scene from Steve Martin's "The Jerk" when panhandlers come begging money from Martin's character Navin Johnson.

Hobart: Very good sir, very good. Oh, there's some charity people here to see you sir.
Navin: Mo, sent them away! There's a lot of people more deserving than me.
Hobart Ah, but these people want you to give.
Navin: Oh, o.k.
(a charity man walks in)
Father: My name is Father Carlos Las Vegas De Cordova.
Navin: Father, you seem like a religious man. How can I help you?
Father: By giving me three minutes of your time so that you can see some film of a great ugliness that is spreading throughout my country.
Navin: Oh God, I bet it's disgusting. Hobart?
Hobart: Yes sir?
Navin: Are you over your grief enough yet to dim the lights?
Hobart: Oh, ha ha, of course sir. One cannot mourn forever.
Father: You will not believe what you are about to see; that human beings could have sunk so low that they can take pleasure to do this to another of Gods creatures. I hope you have a strong stomach senor.
Navin: Roll the ugliness.
(A scene in a Mexican bar - cat juggling!! Navin is shocked.)
Navin: Good Lord - I've heard about this - cat juggling! Stop! Stop! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Good. Father, could there be a god that would let this happen? How much do you want?

What about the judicial system? What about the foundations? You'll run out of letters for your governmental acronym. Smarter men than I have referred to it as the Minotaur, the Polygon and the Cathedral.

Congress doesn't even really hold the purse strings. In the first place, if it were to cut off the flow of money, the members responsible for the decision would be out on their ear in a second. They know it, and will never do so. Secondly, as the recent European example shows, a modern popular government is quite capable of functioning and disbursing money without a sitting congress or any kind of elected legislative body. These guys are practically figureheads.

I told you it would be difficult to undermine the influence of elected officials.

stop electing incumbents. Don't vote for the office holder. Yes, there are problems with this - but I would argue that the associated problems with not electing congress are no more troubling than those problems we currently face.

And _B_ makes a point: the office holder is not necessarily the problem. However, that individual does have to vote for / against funding. Stop electing those that vote to fund the crap we do not like and it will not longer be funded.

Overly simplistic? Possible. Naive? Probably. But true nonetheless.

The real problem is that the two parties have conspired to create a system of safe congressional districts where the incumbent party never faces a series challenge. The only thing that changes after each census is which party has more seats. If we were serious as a nation, we would take the redistricting system out of the hands of the parties. Senators were supposed to be the stability in Congress, but there's more volatility in the Senate than the House thanks to a corrupt system.

the problem won't be solved by voting the scoundrels out. Same problem as we see with the so-called top brass, bringing in new blood won't solve the problem either. This is systemic and deeply rooted. Making it harder for incumbents to be reelected might help, destroying the two party system would probably be even more helpful. On the other hand, considering the two parties are really alliances of disparate groups, I'm not sure about that. A third party might not stop the spoils system-identity politics & Wall Street alliance from wielding political power, or the Evangelical-M.I.C. block, but it would stymie and frustrate them. What would also be needed is a severely weakened Executive.

Regarding the foundations, i.e. American waqfs, I agree they wield inordinate power, and are not subject to enough scrutiny. Their tax-exempt status is a joke. For groups that don't pay the taxes a business person does, they talk an awful lot about how tax monies should be spent.

On Academia, follow the money, it's all about funding, and with the humanities and social sciences it's about federal funding. Federal funding, reflecting DC's schizophrenia, simultaneously promotes bellicose jingoism and post 1960's anti-Western politics of guilt.

If I give you money, what's that tell a casual bystander about our relationship? Nothing. Maybe you're my bitch and I'm telling you to go get me some smokes. Or maybe you're the guy at the deli selling me a pack of Camels and that's our whole relationship. Or maybe you're a local wise guy, and if I don't give you your cut, you break my legs. Following the money leaves us unenlightened.

Follow the RESPONSIBILITY. Do GEN Allen and BHO have to answer to the WP and the NYT? Does a bear shit in the woods? Do the WP and NYT have to answer to GEN Allen and BHO? Does a bear shit in the Louvre?

Notice how crazy just the idea of a non-sovereign press and academia sounds. I mean, if it got out that GEN Allen or BHO ordered the NYT or Noam Chomsky to write favorably of their activities or forbade them to critique those activities, the world would explode. It would probably be less fatal to the General and the President to get caught with kiddy porn. And yet it's not like this way of setting up a society, with a sovereign press and obeisant presidents and generals, is somehow intuitive or natural.

Of course, the press isn't the only sovereign-the nominal leadership must also answer to other entities which it has no control over. We listed them above. Hell, even the civil service might be sovereign. Can Obama really tell State what to do without first being briefed and presented three options by State? If Obama tells State to implement a policy which State disagrees with, what will happen? Who is going to come out for the worse in the long run?

the importance of funding can't be underestimated. Academica is all about patronage, that's the real source of ideological control. Ideological conformity in universities isn't a case of mind-controlling professors wielding their dark arts on innocent undergrads. It's more a case of grad students having to figure out how they will get that degree paid for.

On the other issues, right, that's the point. The blame for the boondoggles is far-ranging, and the agency of figures like the president are hampered, but that doesn't excuse them for participating in the mess. It's not about personalities, it's about institutions and culture.

It is true that prosecution of former presidential administration officials would be devastating, perhaps threatening the system. But, then again, why not? Is the [neoliberal] system worth saving? Sometimes dynamite is needed to break-up a log jam.

Littlemantate, I hope you haven't taken senior military brass off the hook for saluting and saying "Can do!" when they don't even really know what they are supposed to be doing or how?

single-mindedly. Some hounds have been hit by cars they were so preoccupied with the scent. So who do you blame for the accident, the hound or the man who set him on the track?

I'm less inclined to blame a group of people, psychologically primed and socially selected for Pentagon leadership, for promoting war and for underestimating the difficulties therein. And really how long would a senior level official last if he started talking honestly? The push to end his career wouldn't just involve military officials.

This isn't endorsing the obsequious tone one often hears vis-a-vis the generals in the media and by politicians. There is a disturbing level of deference towards prior military commentators like Barry McCaffrey, a veteran of that other successful operation- the war on drugs. Whenever I hear guys like Odierno spout the party line , I think to myself, this is what these guys do, it's their life.

I'm inclined to blame my fellow citizens, often guilt-ridden civilians, whose deference extends far beyond common courtesy, to said commentators. The Pentagon knew what it was doing when it started embedding these commentators to spin for the Iraq war. Going further with the lack of backbone shown in the face of Pentagon intransigence, it was shameful watching Obama let them push him around re: Afghanistan.

Don't blame the dogs of war, blame those villains who loosed them in the first place. Civilian leadership still extends over the military. It is Congress which is too venal, craven, interventionist, or bellicose to cut funding (they could kill this stuff within a single political cycle if they wanted) and many of whom also demand, for political reasons, a positive spin on operations. And it is also the Executive Branch and its unelected senior apparatchiks, so concerned with accruing power, which is facilitated by wars and expanding Defense bureaucracies and the funding thereof. I'm sure military brass in other countries would love to have the toys we give ours, but they are also under adult supervision.

I must admit, that while I agree with criticism at the top brass made by a lot of the commentators here, I think that in focusing so much on said top brass they are letting large swathes of the American populace and our elected leaders off the hook. They are also ignoring a critical component of US failures, we are not culturally fit to be a colonial power and our complexity makes creating a coherent long-term strategy impossible.

Much of this is due to our schizophrenic sense of self and national purpose, which, I believe, goes back to issues left unresolved in the failure of Reconstruction; the strange marriage of Yankee Missionizing and Southern Filibustering (in the 19th-century sense of the word).

Our national purpose is too discordant. Some might argue that only cretins and fascists argue for clarity, and that complex diversity is a strength. I'd counter that complexity is also associated with decadence and insanity. To paraprase George F. Kennan, perhaps we are too big.

Afghanistan has become a total mess. After a decade of being over there it is debatable whether America has actually achieved anything. Sure Osama is dead, but so what? The Taliban is still a menace and power is being handed over to those who could cause a lot of trouble to the West in the future. In short, this is still a very unstable country. And let's not forget the human cost to America. The lives of many young people have been lost, many more have been maimed, marriages have fallen apart and ended in divorce. Then there is the tremendous financial cost to the nation. We can't afford these expensive wars with the deficit being so large. Anyone who says we should now go into Iran is crazy.

just nuts! As bad as things are, something as aberrant as this has to have been perpetrated by someone who has gone crazy. I think that he spent 3 tours in Iraq as a sniper. Let's not do what the talking heads are doing and extrapolate from this tragic incident a lesson about the entire stupid war.

There is one weird thing however. This 38 year old staff sergeant comes from the same base, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, as the other murderers. Makes you wonder. Since 2010, 26 soldiers from that base have committed suicide.

However, if this hastens our departure from Afghanistan, all the better. Amazingly, Newt Gingrich just said that we cannot change their culture and we ought to get out now,

. . . is buzkashi. It's a bit like polo, but involving a rather reduced degree of hygiene and prim air, and without attractive ladies on the sidelines.

It would seem that Omar is convinced we are trying to teach a pig to sing.

"America’s political leaders have lead their more than willing military commanders to turn the nature of their war into something alien from its original intent"

"Omar" is full of crap. Our military leaders are the ones leading the willing, ignorant politicians around by the nose. It's partly due to no combat experience generals (except McChrystal) finding war from the top fun. War has also meant easy promotions. And, war means big bucks for defense contractors. Cynical? You bet.

This is astounding! Further examination shows that Mullah Omar studied Napoleon's invasion into Russia in 1812, and concluded from it that however strongly an offensive may start out, it inevitably weakens as it advances from its original base. He also mentions something about the crusader's need to provide garrisons, as well as maintaining unsecure long lines of supply and communications, etc.

Omar then summerizes that his Taliban as the defender of the holy can fall back upon the sources of their strength, the neighboring country that finds them useful, all the while, observing that the American military is less concerned whether the policy is right, overlooking the effect it has on the conduct of their war, and not getting it that if the policy is wrong than the conduct of the war, no matter how it is waged, will be wrong. . .in essence, theorizing America jumped the shark after 2002 (Omar's term "jumped the shark" is subjective to interpretation).

would have known that any COIN effort faced with an ineffective, highly corrupt government and a porous border with an enabler state is doomed to failure. Both factors would have to be changed to achieve success.

A man as intelligent as General Petraeus should have recognized the trap and prevented further commitments. Instead he wrote an FM whose principals were already well-defined in pre-Vietnam literature and turned COIN into an industry. All those smart foreign advisors and brilliant proteges couldn't pull their noses out of their bosses ass and their mouths out of the feed trough long enough to tell the truth to themselves and to power.

The most humorous phenomenon has been reading post-Vietnam officers talk about COIN as something new or as a fallacious concept - nether being true.

As much as I respect General Petraeus' intellect, I believe that the king has no clothes. The other generals and admirals do not know how to put on their clothes.

A COIN war is the kind of war one could sell to the American public. It reflected America's self-image as a non-imperial, helpful, culturally sensitive power.

Societies engage in the kind of war that reflects their cultural values.

Apparently, Petraeus, like any good salesman, knew his customer.

BD readers are well aware of the plan the Obama administration settled on in 2014, and the reasons it did so. The plan has not worked, and there is no good reason to think that sticking with it until 2014 will make it work.

As I noted upthread, the Afghan debacle was not of President Obama's making, but George W. Bush is gone now and extracting the United States from Afghanistan is now Obama's responsibility. He won't be meeting it by sticking to a 2014 target set in 2009, before we knew what we surely know by now.

I would think that to unscrew this situation would imply some kind of victory, not a withdrawal.

As for jailing Bush, the insanity, unconstitutionality and lack of legal precedent of such an action don't mean that it's impossible. Look at the Trial of the Admirals. Popular government-2400 years of suck.

How we "got here" is my most favorite speculative blog and reading activity. Inertia, partisan political imperatives, and bad thinking about India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are my final answer, I guess. I posted the following elsewhere (SWJ). I now post it again with corrections and additions:

1. Old Cold War bloc thinking including NATO and our Saudi-Pakistan alliance against Iran (one reason among many we continued to cultivate the military dictatorship of Musharraf, even when we knew that Al Q's Taliban hosts were a creation of Pakistan's government).
.
2. The Bush administration's Cold War "habit as policy." We had always worked with Islamabad and Rawalpindi in that part of the world. We assumed if we paid enough, they would do our job and we could invade Iraq. It's not a surprise given that many in the Bush administration, including Sec. Gates and Cheney, were formerly members of the Nixon administration with its "Pakistan tilt" and China policy.
.
3. Ignoring Saudi Arabia's role in 9-11, even as we cultivate Qatar as a "baby" Saudi.
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4. Western modernization and developmental theory leading to "pop-COIN."
.
5. 90's neomercantalism as strategy and policy ( a return to 90s Clinton foreign policy as evidenced by Kerry-Lugar-Berman, expanding NATO in the context of a "reset" with Russia).
.
6. Centcom's desire to have its old South Asian (read, good times again with Pakistan's military) military relationships back?
.
7. The Obama administration's desire to have good relations with "the Muslim" world, as if such a large and complicated world could be understood with childish and patronizing foreign policy and political science theory.*
.
8. A think tank and PhD community that had never questioned its own status quo thinking about Pakistan and Afghanistan, a prominent defense sales lobby, and other DC institutions hungering for more funding (State/USAID/CIA with their Pakistan and Afghanistan program funds.)

*Oddly enough, the diplomats and non-military solutions types also contributed with their old thinking about India and Pakistan as proxy warriors in Afghanistan, when it was the nature of the Saudi-Pakistan proxy war that led to 9-11, not the fact that their was regional jostling between two countries. Obama actually offered to mediate Kashmir early in his presidency (when speaking to Prime Minister Singh, apparently, according to some news reports.)

The biggest problem is that Right, Left, civilians and military both, thought that it was in American interests to play a geostrategic games in Afghanistan once we got in. A lot of people go it wrong. It was bad DC thinking by both the pro and anti-war factions, in a sense. A theory, at any rate....

- Madhu

We are not going to get it right, should admit it, quit worrying about a pivot to Asia because we have good relationships with a variety of countries whose interests roughly overlap ours in many important ways and even the Chinese want to keep the oil and goods flowing. Unfortunately, or DC policy class seems hungry to dig itself in even deeper into the MidEast. A perpetual jobs program, I guess....

Too cynical. Probably. Can you blame me for it after watching American attitudes toward India and Pakistan my entire life? Never could get it right. We are not the British. I don't find fault with the British, but we are not them. Why should we adopt their attitudes in our own American Raj? It's not us. Should just admit it and accept it.

- Madhu

Oh, who am I kidding? My American sensibilities recoil at the post-1947 attitudes toward that part of the world on our part and how romanticizing the British raj is a part of how we Americans "got here." That part of the world jokes about the Kipling-love of a certain type of Dulles/whichever American Cold War General. We always get fooled, goes the joke. Our own romantic notions are part of the way we get conned. We oughta cut it out. I also think the British raj romanticists forget that, early on, they were only one "warlord" among many, their men married into the population and we Americans didn't much like their attitudes when directed toward us. You know, a sort of KONY2012 White Man's Burden that both the American Right and Left feel, but only recognize in the other partisan side, not their own.

Oh, never mind me. I don't know where I am going with this. Maybe "intertia" is the best answer after all.

- Madhu

In response to Obama's plan to pulse a surge, then pull out; ZATHRAS contends the plan not working? I disagree.

The plan's objective is not to leave behind a flourishing democracy. The plan is to provide the Afghans an opportunity to rule themselves. The pulse surge arguably subdued the insurgency to acceptable levels (where Afghans can begin leading ops), the ANA continue to grow (albeit not in any sustainable manner), and GIRoA is developing district governance in many formerly untouched areas.

The US can't expect to turnover Iraq and Afghanistan in states of peace and prosperity. The Iraqis and the Afghans only need conditions to a point where they can fight for the peace and prosperity for themselves. In the case of Afghanistan, if it fails to establish a resilient democracy, that will be the Afghans' doing. The plan should only provide the Afghans an opportunity to establish a government for the people, by the people. And it is doing just that, and no more. If it provides more, than it will be a government for the people, by NATO, and that will not be resilient. Same holds true for Iraq. A government for the Iraqis, by the US occupation force is not particularly resilient.

The single, greatest challenge in Afghanistan is not security or periodic sensational attacks. It's the GIRoA constitution and its institutionalized system of patronage. Until they ammend their constitution, Afghanistan will remain corrupt and dysfunctional. They need provincial elections and district elections. Granted, they should be phased in, beginning with provincial governor elections, then in a few more years, district governor elections. Then their population will be more effectively enfranchised. Currently Karzai is a dictator with democratic window dressing.

huffing glue.

Seriously, after reading that, I got all light headed and had to check to see if I had a paint ring around my mouth and nose. But, nothing.

>The plan is to provide the Afghans an opportunity to rule themselves.

They, uh, they had that. It was called "The Taliban." You know, those guys were very Afghan. We fixed that, though, didn't we? A bunch of guys in suits spouting glib Western talking points are much better at running the place, and any difficulties are either temporary or not our fault.

>The US can't expect to turnover Iraq and Afghanistan in states of peace and prosperity.

I'll say.

>In the case of Afghanistan, if it fails to establish a resilient democracy, that will be the Afghans' doing.

No True Afghan fallacy. Meaning, if we dump seventy eleventy bazillion dollars and lives into a place in an attempt to turn it into Maryland and it doesn't turn into Maryland, the problem is not with our plan-the problem is with the place.

>The single, greatest challenge in Afghanistan is not security or periodic sensational attacks. It's the GIRoA constitution and its institutionalized system of patronage.

Patronage is a healthy and natural relationship in any society. For instance, your university or think tank or whatever pays you to write, and you write. What is unnatural is a constitution and popular government.

>They need provincial elections and district elections.

Like Whitney needed more rock, the Afghans need more democracy. We've learned nothing in 40 years.

There is nothing really that will be gained by staying there for that much longer. I think that as soon as we leave, the place will start falling apart like a broken marriage. The Taliban may even be able to make a comeback since a lot of people hate the American occupation and therefore anyone who is America's enemy might be seen as their friend. People have got short memories and they are not likely to remember how the Taliban supressed and controlled them. They might return to the lessor of two evils in their eyes.

I know why we went in. I understand the fall of 2001 and the spring of 2002. That was all about getting al Qaeda (which unfortunately Tommy Franks seemed to interpret as pushing them into Pakistan) and changing the government of Afghanistan.

It is after that that I don't get.

Best,
Tom