Green on Blue: causes and responses (merged thread)

[Dayuhan]

It would be treachery if a battalion of ANA switches sides and shoots/beheads the US mentoring/training team with them.

If that were to happen on whose doorstep would you lay the blame?

If you want to lay blame, you have to lay it on whoever did the killing. Whether that makes it treachery or betrayal is another question altogether.

Going beyond immediate blame, though, I'd want to look at the assumptions behind so much of what goes on in Afghanistan. We want to conjure up a national government and a national military, structured along western lines, in a place where loyalty is not to nation but to clan or tribe. We assume that once someone joins an army they are then "loyal" to the government and the nominal chain of command, and if they act on any other loyalty we speak of treachery and betrayal.

Our idea of a national army and a national government stem from our idea of a nation, and I'm not sure that concept has much meaning in Afghanistan. If it doesn't, and if our purposes are incompatible with the perceived interests of large numbers of Afghans, the idea of creating an army (let alone a nation) from scratch - hard enough in the best circumstances - is going to be pretty unrealistic and is likely to involve all kinds of obstacles and hazards.

Is it rally possible to develop an effective strategy and to implement an effective campaign to achieve that strategy if the policy goal the strategy is meant to advance is fundamentally flawed and unrealistic?

Saw this elsewhere on the site; pessimistic but I suspect not entirely inaccurate:

http://nation.time.com/2012/09/19/af...n-do-is-leave/