Quote Originally Posted by Steve the Planner View Post
Your description is bulemic. But I don't know that it is wrong.
Bulimic to a degree, and I wish it were wrong. But as you wrote in response to BW...

Afghanistan is, at its core, aspirational, and transformational on the most radical levels---change everything, create new stuff, make things happen which never happened (or even been dreamed of happening before), and do it very fast with people who are not ready for it, and with institutions and structures yet to be defined or created.

I'm not sure that a lot of folks on the military side really understand the profundity of what is being proposed as the civilian foundation for their efforts. Somewhere, there is always a pitch that the real work has to be done elsewhere by somebody else (State Department? USAID? Karzai?) but there is never any clear connection to an actual plan or resource to do this stuff.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. When we decided to undertake this radical transformative change-and-create approach, who did we think was going to do the changing, creating, and transforming? The military? DoS? AID? Did we really think the Afghans were simply going to kick back and let us transform their country as we saw fit, without any objection? Did we just think somebody somewhere was going to somehow make it all work?

I just don't grasp the process that led us to believe that we could accomplish that sort of change in a time frame that would be acceptable in our domestic political picture.