with

1.) Infrastructure? This in a country that only had one railroad, a several mile track in Kabul from the shah's place.

2.) Tolerant, traditional Islam? That must explain why the Hazaras were enslaved so readily by their Sunni neighbors. That also explains the thriving non-Islamic communities in Afghanistan, including the animists in Kaffiristan, oh no wait, Nuristan.

3.) What these two gentlemen are basically arguing for is throwing a whole lot of money down a dark well in the off chance that the US government's wishes might come true. They don't suggest dealing with the warlords or the corrupt Afghan Parliament. In fact, they really don't about social reform at all. Just keep throwing money, and build infrastructure, and we will win. As can be seen in many such 3rd world recipients of constant aid, such largess often doesn't work; indeed, it is often used by corrupt locals to further empower themselves. Even sending in hordes of trained professionals will not help. It will wear our Western patience much faster than a smaller, more pragmatic approach as advocated by Rory Stewart.
But hey, it's other people's tax money, so who cares?

"Rather than describing Afghanistan with the language of war and battles, we have come to think of the country as an ailing patient -- in many ways analogous to a weakened person under attack by an aggressive infection."

So does Afghanistan have health insurance? Is it covered in the recent health reform bill?

I have a better metaphor -- the Global War on Terror ought not have been a war at all but an aggressive policing operation.

Please read Andrew Bacevich's work.

If you don't have time you can listen to him speak:

How to get out of Afghanistan:

http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2009/12/17/is-it-time-to-get-out-of-afghanistan/

I expected an article confirming that the war was an exercize in futility - instead these military mind-sets argue that we can achieve the goal of a western-style democracy with freedom for all (including women), religious tolerance, and an orderly polity, respecting the rule of law - - - - if we are wiiling to spend countless gazillions of our money and an inestimable number of our youngsters lives in the process.

These guys have a clue to the cure for what ails Afghanistan after 6 months on the ground? No, just an inability to comprehend any solution to any problem in the world that does not involve an armed intervention by our military. Training the Afghan security forces reminds me of the "Vietnamization" of an earlier war; let's just change the color of the uniforms (and the skin) of the people dying for our ends.

The disease? it's global terrorism, and we won't kill it no matter what we do in Iraq or Afghanistan (or Iran, or Somalia, or Pakistan). If our 'cure' becomes too effective in one failed state, there will be plenty of other places for it to take root anew. There are better solutions, and some like Professor Bacevich have been suggesting them for years, but they involve coming to an understanding of our own limitations.

There was a point in time where a stable Afghanistan existed, prior to soviet meddling in the country Afghanistan was in relative peace. We are not look to establish a western style democracy, just a stable state that can resist being a host to parasites like Al-queda.

If we could be guaranteed that Al-queda will not return to Afghanistan we would leave, but until that is the case we can't afford to. We dropped the ball once in Afghanistan, we could have shaped it in a more positive direction after the Soviets withdrew. Instead once the soviets lost interest, so did we and it came to bite us later.

I'd rather not repeat that mistake.

I am shocked to find that the Group Think that Americans have been afflicted with throughout recent history is alive and well.

Just read the simpletons suggesting cures to problems of other countries whilst their own country is going to the dogs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/graham-e-fuller/global-viewpoint-obamas-p_b_201355.html

Graham E. Fuller

Former CIA station chief in Kabul and author of The Future of Political Islam
Posted: May 10, 2009 03:41 PM

For all the talk of "smart power," President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

-- Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

-- The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

-- It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The "Durand Line" is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan's 28 million Pashtuns.

-- India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan -- in the intelligence, economic and political arenas -- that chills Islamabad.

-- Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

-- Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

-- The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible -- with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives -- to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

-- The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -- the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

-- The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

-- Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that -- something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule -- not what Pakistan needs -- will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad's basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education -- areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaida's threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.

How to get out of Afghanistan:

http://whyy.org/cms/radiotimes/2009/12/17/is-it-time-to-get-out-of-afghanistan/

There are three US blunders that are largely responsible for the failure of US mission and Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.

First, during the siege of Kunduz in November 2001, the Bush administration allowed Pakistan to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan from where Mullah Omar’s QST has been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

Second, Bush administration did NOT provide sufficient troops to secure Afghanistan against Taliban.

Third, Bush recruited Musharraf’s Pakistan to fight the very terrorist threat that Pakistan itself created. So Musharraf played duplicitous game of running with the hare while hunting with the hounds. While capturing and killing some Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders based on US intelligence, Musharraf continued to shelter, protect and support Mullah Mohammed Omar’s Quetta Shura Taliban in Quetta, provincial capital of Baluchistan and Haqqani network in North Waziristan.

Obama administration has continued the mollycoddling of Pakistan at the expense of Afghanistan.

The Obama Administration’s propensity to clutch at straws as it prepares for a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan has been its illusion that there has been a ‘turnaround’ in Pakistani policies of supporting the Taliban because of the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the second-ranked Taliban leader, by a joint team of the CIA and ISI in Karachi. The reality appears to be that the CIA stumbled upon a Taliban hideout in Karachi and the arrest of Baradar was purely coincidental. More important, his arrest was an embarrassment, as Baradar was secretly —and unknown to the Pakistanis — in touch with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a UN Envoy.

Both Mr Karzai and Baradar are Durrani Pashtuns, sharing common tribal loyalties. An infuriated Karzai now finds his reconciliation efforts with the Taliban undermined, with the Pakistanis procrastinating on his demand for the extradition of Baradar to Afghanistan. Pakistan, which for years has denied the presence of the Mullah Omar-led ‘Quetta shura’ on its soil, now brazenly demands that it should be the prime intermediary in any process of reconciliation with the Taliban — a demand the Obama Administration appears to be meekly succumbing to.

There are multiple reasons why America / Israel / India are losing at every war at every front.

Primarily, the days of colonisations have come and gone. So, East European Jew’s Israel’s 60+ years of colonisation, hidden under the false garb of Zionism, is a non starter.

In fact this Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine, and its slow genocide of innocent, unarmed Palestinian men, women and children, is the prime mover of all Muslim resistance movements from North Africa to Southern Russia to The Subcontinent to distant Indonesia.

America is losing in the eyes of practically every nation in the world because America has wrong-headedly sided heavily with the oppressor viz. Israel. America’s historical machinations against Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc. are nothing more than the vector of American/Israeli colonisation programme of Palestine.

India is losing because it has recently joined these perpetual losers along with its similar colonisation programme of Kashmir and other deep-seated anti-Muslim hatred that culminates in yearly pogroms or communal riots against Muslim minority trapped within India.

But this is truly funny:

"What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures."

In other words, wash your hands of it, and hand it over to the feckless, bottomless pit of NGOs and other organizations that do little but feed dictators worldwide, while selling indulgences to the West so diplomats can feel like they are "doing something."

That may be cheaper in terms of blood and money, but don't pretend it will fix anything. Diogenes is still looking for a NGO free of political taint.