Changing views on Afghanistan.

If you woke up today it was hard to miss the differing analyses on the war in Afghanistan. Dexter Filkins wrote a piece on the challenges facing McChrystal over the next 24 months, Thomas Friedman laid down an argument calling for a stronger US hand against Karzai's courruption, and the Times reported again on Vice President Biden's "specialized security" strategy.

If you didn't read all of Filkin's piece on McChrystal I don't blame you, it was about as long as a small book. Although if you did, you noticed he pointed out some interesting characteristics of the strategy being deployed in Afghanistan. McChrystal is focusing on three new goals, protect the Afghan people, build an Afghan state, and make friends with whoever you can. Its obvious if we want to "win" we need to gain the support of the local population, to do this the commander has decided to back off from engaging the enemy. Instead new tactics will revolve around making the insurgents come to us, if the insurgency revolves around people, McChrystal says "What I want to do is get on the inside, looking out — instead of being on the outside looking in.”

The general also believes that he can make many of the insurgents switch sides. Much like Iraq in 2007 when large groups of insurgents became police officers (aka we paid them to switch sides), McChyrstal believes the insurgents in Afghanistan could be handled in similar fashion. I tend to go along with this theory too, the Pashtun's like any people are looking for a stable, safe environment, they are not ideologically driven so they will flock to whoever offers them that haven.

McChrystal likes to talk about the 2 different ways of fighting the war. There is the hard side and soft side, for the general and his commanders the "hard side" necessitates an increased number of soldiers in the country that can provide security to civilians, while they rebuild their government. The soft side focuses on training soldiers, the problem here is that a large percentage (something like 1 in 4) of Afghan's are illiterate. Imagine training soldiers that cannot read or write, it took nearly four years to create Iraq's security force. Not to mention you have to consider funding a force of around 200,000, that would cost about 4 to 5 billion dollars, the Afghan yearly revenue is more in the ball park of 600 million.

Building a stable government that provides basic services for Afghani's was the other key to McChrystal's success. This leads us to the valid point that Friedman brought up in his op-ed today.

"This is crazy. We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people."

This problem is not going to be fixed by military leaders, international pressure needs to be applied to the Karzai gang. Freidman pointed out that he is basically running his own form of the mafia. You scratch my back I scratch yours. You piss me off, you end up wearing cement shoes. Until the corruption at the top is cut off, the people will continue to look for service's from outside influences (Taliban.)

I've written a number of post's on Afghanistan and most have concluded with an argument in favor of American withdrawal from the conflict. Biden's plan calls for special forces and drones to keep Al Qaeda down for the count. I really believe that can work, the CIA has already been able to kill 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders. Yet if our troops withdrawal from the countryside it is certain that the Taliban will again take over. We may be able protect our own interests from terrorist threats, but we won't be able to protect the lives and rights of the Afghans we leave behind. Obama like any good idealist has spread the values of democracy across the world during the last 9 months, last week he won a Nobel Peace Prize for it. We should only hope that the President will insure that those ideals are spread to the people of Afghanistan, they've waited thirty years for peace, and we've already come this far.

TLH