Via Kevin Drum, apparently most of the additional troops arriving in Afghanistan next year are going to be dedicated to defending Kabul. Drum elaborates:
Two years ago, the main complaint was that, sure, Kabul was safe, but it was just a small island of security in a vast sea of lawlessness. Today, we're apparently close to losing even that small island… Baghdad was considered so central to Iraqi security that if it could be pacified, it would make an enormous difference in the rest of the country too.
That's not true of Afghanistan. Obviously Kabul has to be safe, but it doesn't play the same outsize role that Baghdad does in Iraq.
Anyways, I recently attended a Chatham House rules event on Afghanistan and I was similarly discouraged by what I was hearing there. From what I learned there, it sounds like there was no intention of switching to a more confederated organization for Afghanistan and that we were were generally going to keep flowing the majority of aid dollars through the central government. Our loyalty to the Karzai government apparently doesn’t run both ways, and we’re up against a much smarter foe in the Taliban than in Al Qaeda in Iraq.
If we want to be able to exit on anything like favorable terms, the incoming administration is either going to have to abandon the war on opium production (possibly by offering a deal like Turkey has) or start moving to a con-federal model. I don’t think even a substantial increase in resources is going to cut it.
U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Michael Bracken used under a creative commons license.
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