Quote Originally Posted by Carl View Post
Bob and JJackson:

The big question is how can you make them do it? A negotiated solution whereby everybody has to agree to play nice together is a great goal but what if they refuse to do it? The teacher Bob mentioned has moral authority but ultimately she has recourse to superior physical force with which to impose her will upon the combatants. She calls the cops.

If the antagonists in this case refuse to play nice, who are we going to call? Are we willing to impose the physical force needed to make them, especially the Taliban who get to hide in Pakistan?

What concerns me about this is the point I raised before. By the nature of our society, the deck is stacked against us in "talks." Dayahun said in another thread that one or both sides will just use the talks to advance their real goal, acquisition of total power.

The tragic thing about this is the wishes of the long suffering Afghan civilian don't matter much. The wishes of the people who are willing to organize, arm themselves, seek support and fight, for good cause or bad, are the ones that matter.
Or any other country. But we did, and we are now committed to keeping our illegitimate solution in power.

We all know how we would feel if China inserted itself In US politics to keep some party in power to protect their national interest of preventing the default on our debt to them or adoption of expensive programs that made that default more likely. Yet somehow we cannot grasp that others look at our interventions in the same way. Hell, maybe China would indeed save us from our own foolishness, but even the best external program forced on some nation is worse than the worst internal program the adopt on their own.

There is no easy or sure answer to this, but there are smart fundamental parameters that we routinely violate, usually to our chagrin.

There are viable models out there that can guide our actions. A constitution in Lebanon that guarantees roles and percentages of seats by critical interest group. A US constitution that keeps any one branch of power from becoming to strong, and a bill of rights that protects the populace from the government, and ensures that the government stays in line for fear of an informed and armed populace.

COIN doctrine is rooted in Colonial and Cold War control of others. It needs updated to recognize a greater neutrality on the part of those who deign to intervene in the governance of others. Similarly the U.S. is grown too used to controlling others with various tools of statecraft, and is therefore frustrated by the ineffectiveness of those tools on controlling non-state entities. Another area that needs updating.

But the real bottom line is, what do we lose by attempting to reconcile the parties and forcing them to share governance within the constraints of a new constitution under the oversight of the coalition until they prove they can play nice? Isn't 10 years of spinning our wheels enough? At the end of the day the Taliban are not and never were an enemy of the U.S.; and it is the Pashtun people, not the governments of Afghanistan or Pakistan that grant sanctuary to AQ. We just need to refocus a bit.