Elements of Obama’s Afghanistan plan are now leaking out at a steady rate. I’m not going to slam the plan until I hear it from the president’s mouth, and he might be more convincing than the early reports. I do have one quibble with what I’ve read so far. It comes at the end of this:
[British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown said that the strategy calls for “transfer of lead security responsibility to the Afghans — district by district, province by province — with the first districts and provinces potentially being handed over during the next year,” depending on “the Afghans being ready.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that transferring security responsibility for specific Afghan areas will be “a big part of what you’ll hear the president talk about tomorrow.”
Allied governments have pressed Karzai to remove warlords and cronies from senior government positions. Over the next nine months, Brown said, the Afghan president “will be expected to implement . . . far-reaching reforms to ensure that, from now on, all 400 provinces and districts have a governor appointed on merit, free from corruption, with clearly defined roles, skills and resources.”
It’s not as if Hamid Karzai is some sadistic sociopath like Saddam Hussein. He hasn’t appointed warlords to prominent positions because he is fond of warlordism. The decision to use warlords is necessitated by the need to otherwise, you know, make war on them. You can’t fix an endemic problem like that by issuing lectures about merit and ‘clearly defined roles.’ When I hear bullshit like that coming from the British Prime Minister, I am not instilled with great confidence. Yes, it is a worthy goal. But I don’t see it working out quite the way they hope.
