and the under-utilized installed solar capacity in Afghanistan
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/1/234736/1198

but now we’re here, and we need to prevent central asia from turning into west africa + nukes + takfiri fanatics… and the only way i can see to do that is via genuine, hard-headed nation-building. an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: we need to make sure the power vacuum doesn’t come back. we need to fill it with a government that can secure and provide for its people. if we don’t, we’re going to need a whole pound of cure, and if you think the ounce is expensive, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

I have no issue with gradualism, not even with keeping Karzai in power (checking him a bit by forcing the rhetoric of democracy upon him). Nor do I think it is in the nature of the people to be as stupid as their leaders have proven to be over the past few decades. And I don’t know whether Karzai would defeat the Taliban after smoking some stuff in that big great tent of his.

But I do know that without physical military presence there would be no chance in hell that the new order that establishes itself there would be any different from its previous version. And maybe it is not our fault that we forget what happened then because Bush and co have lied to all of us on what supposedly was happening elsewhere, but it’s still a forgetting that seems ill-advised.

Ans: Yes, EXACTLY. The job description of the President of the United States and members of Congress is not that of “social worker.” Unfortunately, SOME things in this world ARE zero-sum games/events. What is good for the US citizen and registered voter to whom our elected representatives are responsible unfortunately just may not be in the best interests of Afghan women, children, etc.—at lest within the lifetime of those US citizen voters now alive. And it does no good to say that “in the long run” we would ALL be better off “en grosso mondo” if Afghan society were “modernized.” As has been famously stated previously (by a prominate anti-war “man of the left” btw) “in the long-run we are all dead.”

The part of the comparison with Vietnam that IS valid, I feel, is the fact that Afghan society is a tribalized, fractured, inward-ward-looking (by dint of geography, history, culture and religion) amalgam of distinct and distant tribes/villages with little sense of a national “governmental” identity in much the same way life in Vietnam centered on village society in which the District Chief was a distant figure let alone the national government. And in both cases also the national government and capitol city are regarded by the rural tribes/villagers as a distant morass of corruption sucking the life out of rural areas via repressive taxes and returning little in the way of services such as improved roads for farmers to get goods to mkt, etc.

The point is that drug-eradication efforts, “consciousness raising” efforts to liberalize the place of women in society, etc., only serve to drive the tribal elders into the arms of the Taliban who are their rivals otherwise. Compared to the Taliban, many (if not most) tribal elders seem massive wellsprings of progressive thought. Our choices in Afghanistan are NOT as between good and evil. Rather, they are, as Henry Kissinger once put it: between the truly nasty and totally disagreeable on the one hand and the absolute unbearable and unendurable on the other. Not pretty, but true. If we wish to keep our hand in the game to both influence events to our liking and simultaneously better the lot of ALL the Afghans we should pick the likely tribal winners and shower them with bribes/”support” of guns and money and basic infrastructure construction under THEIR ambit of control and let them love us and our money from afar. “Shower them with money” and bribe them for their affections—isn’t that how Hugh Heffner gets the babes? It’s also how the British controlled the key land of Egypt for a verrrry long time. As one British diplomat was once quoted as saying in response to the question of how England was able to so effectively “rule” Egypt: “Oh, we don’t ‘rule’ anything at all—but we control those who do.”

Anyway I don’t think our ‘enemies’ and goals are so clear cut. Are we fighting the Taliban, or organized (narco-) crime? Are we waging war on corruption, or terrorism? etc. and if the ‘enemy’ aren’t an easily distinguishable fighting force per se, then the goal of destruction/surrender isn’t quite as appropriate…but maybe destruction of the Taliban, insofar as they are the enemy, isn’t even what we want. Most of the news media here is concerned with our operations training the Afghan army – the messages being sent aren’t those of war.

http://warisboring.com/?p=2524#more-2524

No kidding. It’s about time. IMDB doesn’t even mention the song.

Conor… thanks for sharing this paper. It’s hard to know what else to say.

I guess I have a forgive-a-stupid-question question about this:

The initial United States “invasion force” consisted of a few hundred CIA and Special Forces operatives who flew into the country with suitcases full of cash and linked up with the various militias…

Is this reasonably comparable to the funding of Awakening movements in Iraq?

Funny, it seemed to me just the opposite—that he was calling for a phasing-down of the US presence there and the adoption of a more realistic, and thus much more limited, set of goals.