It's entitled Saving Afghanistan and it's only ten pages. Brief as it is, this report from the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs presents one of the most coherent and effective summaries of Afghanistan; its history, its paradoxes and dilemmas, what's needed to turn it around and why. You can find it here:
If you read these ten pages you'll have a better working understanding of the Afghanistan challenge and how those countries behind "the mission," Canada included, are getting the fundamentals wrong. Harper and, especially, Hillier need to read this - maybe even take a pop quiz on it.
We're spinning our wheels in Afghanistan. In part that's because we're fighting only one of several wars that are underway in that country and region and the war we've chosen to fight isn't going to resolve the others. We're struggling mightily to prop up something that is rotting out before our eyes - the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai and its thoroughly corrupt judicial system and security forces.
We're not fighting this to win. We're there to fight battles, not to win a war. It's now widely accepted that 80% of what we recognize as Taliban forces aren't even actual Talibs, Islamic extremists. They're disgruntled Afghan nationalists and those who've been preyed upon by the Karzai corruption and those who've lost family members to our air strikes plus even more who simply need a job. That 80% is the hallmark of our failure and it speaks to the futility of trying to wage a counter-insurgency on the cheap.
In Vietnam, America won all the battles. It just never figured out how to win the war. Hillier and Harper are also fixated on fighting battles because the question of what it will take to win this war is one that, for them, is better left unasked.
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