Well....

Probably just icing on Dahayun's cake, but I come out of two edu-theories of nations and national structure/wealth.

Without dispute, a nation that soaks itself dry, which produces nothing, adds nothing to a civic path, is, if not failed, failing. Plenty of examples of nations lost in their own issues, and going nowhere.

The goal in US nation-building is, in most cases, to supplant indigenous leadership, and initiate a substantive (and secular) change in a place that, already by self-selection, is a problem child, if not a basket case.

But our military and foreign policy objectives are not grounded in basic history of the emergence and vitality of successful places/regions or nations, and the routine transformative local or regional drivers, or unique comparative resource, locational or economic advantages that differentiate a failing area from a prospering one.

In Iraq, as I met many of the senior technocrats, they were proud of their role in twice rebuilding their country after major wars, even against the restraints of embargos, and arbitrary dictatorial government. Might not be paradise to us, but they were proud of what they had done, and on many levels, antagonistic to US civ/mil efforts that kept them from their duties/pride in rebuilding their country themselves. VP Mahdi was in Washington yesterday, and unambiguous about their self-determination, and getting the US forces out---to fly, they need us to get out of the way.

As MG Caslan (MND-North) said last month on his public post-tour debrief, he was skeptical of turning things over to Iraqis, but Gen Odierno impressed on him how important it was for the Iraqis, and the zeal they had for self-rule and independence (even with risks of instability).

Smoke and mirrors aside, Iraq has substantial resource, locational and cultural elements that, if they don't tear it apart, will drive it forward---with or without us.

But Afghanistan is a different problem all together. Current Afghans are born into economic, geographic, logistical and resource limitations, despite that it may have been prosperous once. But our strategy does not succeed by helping them to tread water----they have to grow, change, reinvent themselves in remarkable ways to meet our objectives---and it is not happening.

I don't believe that it is not happening because of them, but because of US. We are back to the same old top-down, project and program thing that drove so much of the criminality and corruption---no effective focus, synchronization of actions,or measuarble and sustainable goals.

Our operational focus is not to transform Afghanistan, but to deliver projects and programs already sold somewhere else. Right now,our deliverable is "boots on the ground", and dollars deployed, but we have no realistic transformative strategy or plan that can create 1+1>2 dynamics. Right now, we are still struggling to make 1+1=1, and that isn't going to achieve what we need.

In economic geography, we learn that resources, linkages, transporation and trade patterns, nodality, populations, all create and shape the economic bones of a place, and the collection and connection of those places creates the hierarchy that is a nation, and the reason to bound and defend it as a nation distinct from the "other" places.

Similarly, but from a different perspective, is Jane Jacobs, whose epic tome, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, derives from the shopkeeper, sidewalk interactions, and local associations,interactions and businesses that builds the framework for a city (not to exclude modern suburban distributed city forms), and the city drives the region, which adds up to the wealth and connectivity of nation.

Last April, I had the opportunity to talk with John Adams, em. prof of econ geography at UMinn about US military/foreign policy strategies for building nations in the top-down, just add water approach. It simply defies history, reality and functional evidence. You have to first find and develop some unique economic value, or hope for one, in a place to set that place in motion, and the rest of the places have to raise to a level that regional interactions can become transformative drivers (1+1>2).

If we want to see Afghanistan become something other than what it is, we need to get smart and focused, and become very Afghan-oriented. Maybe, but who will drive and deliver that?





Long ago, I learned that knowledge is transferable, but wisdom is not.

But, this business of implementing unstructured and unfocused projects and programs, for the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq has shown that 1+1<2 if poorly conceived, unsynchronized to any viable local attributes.

The more I watch the logistic dog collar pulling back on our limits in Afghanistan, the more sure I am that, unlike Iraq,