Afghanistan and the new Surge

It's amazing how policy is made and digested in today's world of twenty-four hour news and pundit analysis not only of the policy itself, but also of who is in and who may be out of influence with the current occupant of the oval office. The latest round of policy decisions on Afghanistan offers a good example of just how un-focused the fourth estate is on delivering information in favor of an entertainment styled digest of who's who: is Biden in? what did Rumsfeld or Cheney say? who can refute the fastest? did President Obama chose the right venue for his policy speech on Afghanistan? And on the questions go, but in the next several months nearly a hundred thousand troops (US and NATO) will be on the ground in Afghanistan for a military operation designed to squelch militant Taliban and Al-Qaeda operations and not to engage nation-building -- at least that appears to be what we are hearing regarding US policy in Central Asia.

However, it has been the failure of nation-building, the failure of re-building war torn Afghanistan over nearly nine years that has created conditions ripe for a resurgence of the Taliban. What is meant by the oft heard phrase "nation-building"? Usually it means working to create the setting for a stable government with as little fraud and corruption as possible, the construction of roads, water/electric infrastructure, medical services, schools, public safety, welfare for the poor (which is nearly everyone in the country), food, and jobs that come along with the re-building process. Afghanistan has been war torn and rift with civil conflict ever since the end of the Soviet Occupation in 1988-89 and there are many ethnic and regional factions that make up the Afghanistan and undermine the very notion of an Afghan nation.  Do we really need a straight-forward military strategy and will it satisfy US interests and resolve the breakdown in Afghanistan? There was a disconnect between what is needed in Afghanistan and US policy by the Bush Administration, who squandered nearly eight years by not paying attention to nation-building in the area where Al-Qaeda and the Taliban were based in favor of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11.

In fact, since 2001, US policy has actually contributed to the conditions leading up to the Taliban resurgence and there were plenty of warning signs over the past eight years and now that the Taliban control lots of Afghan territory a military option seems the only thing to do. And the Obama Administration is moving forward with a military solution, which unfortunately still ignores the issue of creating a peace time infrastructure that would help eliminate the reasons for the Taliban resurgence. On top of this is the porous Afghan/Pakistani border and the majority Pashtun population that occupies that area -- a population that has not been adverse to a Pashtunistan in the past, an entity that would effectively dissolve both Afghanistan and Pakistan as we know it today. The Afghan question cannot be separated from connections with Pakistan -- it is a related set of problems and needs to be approached in tandem with much more than a troop surge.

In terms of understanding the region and examining US policy, there needs to be a broader examination of the recent history and how that history is playing out on the ground today in order to understand the folly of US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past ten plus years. I hope to offer such an analysis in the weeks ahead and look forward to reading comments from folks with an interest on this topic.