Look, I want to see Afghans enjoy security and prosperity without living under some twisted imported version of 9th-Century Islam. I don’t want to see a resurgence of the Taliban or a return of safe havens for jihad training centers. But I keep reading stuff like this and it makes me extremely doubtful that we can succeed or will succeed in getting a decent outcome.
Fundamental to plans for undermining the insurgency is to set up Afghan security forces — robust, competent, honest, well equipped and well led. If such forces can be created, then the plan is to hand them responsibility for the security achieved by the Army and Marines, allowing for an American withdrawal.
But the bad reputation of the Afghan police forces, in particular, along with the spotty performance of Afghan forces in Marja, suggest that the work and the spending of billions of American dollars to date had not achieved anything like the desired effects.
The Afghans in the meeting with the colonels were blunt. “They said: ‘We’re with you. We want to help you build. We will support you. But if you bring in the cops, we will fight you till death,’ ” Colonel Newman said.
The plan is to bring in the cops; already they are arriving at American-built outposts.
Again, I don’t have a moral objection to being in Afghanistan. My whole concern is for what’s best for our country’s national security and what’s best for ordinary Afghans (in that order). I don’t buy the whole ‘fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here’ nonsense, and generally think just being there presents an irritant that spurs blowback. I’d be more willing to stick with a new strategy in Afghanistan if the central government (and their cops) had a shred of legitimacy, but they don’t. Honestly, this problem with the Karzai government is the strongest parallel with the war in Vietnam. Even when our troops adopt wise policies and earn trust, it doesn’t do any good if the villagers don’t trust their own countrymen not to rob them blind.
My concern isn’t that we’re doing something immoral just by being in Afghanistan. My concern is that we’re spending a lot of money and losing lives and getting wrapped up in the opium trade, and basically relying on a miracle to see us through.
