Quote Originally Posted by Bill Moore View Post
What are we trying to accomplish in Afghanistan? What is the policy?
The million dollar question!

I think AQ fell off the "reasons for staying in Afghanistan" list sometime ago; I don't know if this was inadvertant or not. It would be an interesting survey to compare policy statements WRT Afghanistan and Karzai from 2001 to 2011 to detect changes.

Unfortunately, I think the answer to the million dollar question at the present time is framed by many policymakers, targetting a fickle public, as "rebuild Afghanistan under its elected government". This makes for great soundbites and shows care for the priniciples of liberalism of democracy for humanity....

...and is also is completely unrealistic. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we define victory in terms of inked-thumbs and girls going to school - yet these are the metrics and images we choose to define it by. For some reason, the current attitude seems to be one of "there's an insurgency, let's counter it!" as opposed to "do we need to be here?" "White man's burden" redux?

So you get a poor military who is looked upon to lead this effort (despite all the pithy phrases in doctrine saying the military is only a supporting effort) and does what it does best; provides military solutions. Nothing like turning a series of tactical tasks (clear, hold, build) into a strategy.