Gloomy US intelligence assessment coming or Let's hear from the spies

[ganulv]

Not taking a side on the debate, but assuming it was even possible for the President to not announce an end date with the current financial crisis and bigger priorities at home and other security concerns, would it make a difference if we stayed at current strength until 2020 in your opinion?

I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion, really, but I suspect that there is a reason Afghans are stereotyped as thinking in the longue durée and Americans are stereotyped as thinking in the media cycle.

The bigger part of what I have read about Afghan history and society is via one of the faculty members at my graduate program. In a 2009 report his take was that

[t]he contradictory policies and practices of state building, including those of the post-Taliban era under US tutelage, have re-affirmed a dysfunctional, sovereignty-based, person-centred, Kabul-centred and kin-based political culture to the exclusion of more inclusive governance. Military intervention and the “war on terror” have once again empowered the Pashtun elites and a small number of their laganbardaar clients from “minority” ethnic groups to transform Afghanistan from a failed state into, at best, a fragile regional militia state. [p. 10 at LINK]

His recommendation is to shoot for a federated* rather than centralized form of government with defense organized at the most local level possible. If I understand the VSO efforts correctly they seem to amount to the training of a gendarmerie. If that is indeed the case then I would guess that a lot of Afghans are reading the program as an effort by Kabul to work its tentacles into their lives rather than as an effort to create true local defense forces something like the minutemen. The creation of something like the minutemen would presume the existence of functional local groups something like New England town meetings and engagement with them, not just handing out small arms to young men in rural areas. I don’t think anyone with good sense would be under the illusion that creation of that sort of federated system would be simple or painless—look at how long it took the Swiss to arrive at their current arrangement—or that a well-resourced strategy aimed at that outcome would invariably succeed.

*It’s not an analogy I have ever seen or heard him use, but something akin to the Swiss Confederation if I understand correctly.