DISQUS

You should read BruceR for info about Kandahar. He has great things to say from his experience as an embedded trainer.

"One explanation is that Task Force Curahee, the unit operating in the province since last April that was built around the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 101st Airborne... transitioned out of Khost and adjacent provinces last month. Insurgents may be looking to take advantage of the rotation schedule. Curahee apparently stepped up its own operational tempo in response."

That's not much of an explanation, since the trend you're discussing began months before the Currahee TOA. In fact, Khost has been an incredibly violent place for well over a year -- when you were there last year, it was already far more dangerous than it was in 2007.

Defer? Woah.

I think you're right. Obama is correct to abandon the weird Butch Cassidy thing Bush had with Karzai, but he's taken it a step too far, right down to snubbing Karzai at his innauguration. That starts to become counterproductive as it helps to undermine the government of an allied democracy we claim to want to support.

Also, the governors all owe their fealty to Karzai. If he gets pissy, they go. They're not administrators in the same way we'd consider state governors. So if Karzai goes, then there will probably be a huge turnover in provincial governors -- something of a nightmare I doubt the writers of Afghanistan's constitution pondered much when they made it so dependent on the personality of one man.

Rajiv deserves a lot of praise for that piece -- it is very balanced (which is rare).

... and with a sample size of one, we pretend like a single Taliban spokesman:

a) is representative of the entire insurgency (which he is not if he works for Haqqani);

b) is telling the truth;

c) is not at all pushing his own side's line of propaganda;

And probably something else. Yes, file this away, but it is one data point -- and much of it is at odds with other accounts of Taliban activity and motives. Some of which you have cataloged here.

I'm just sayin' -- it helps to contextualize your own work, you know?

You know, it's kind of weird that Amin Tarzi, who is closely associated with the Marine Corps University, isn't involved there.

It's also kind of noteworthy that the same crowd that has screwed things up is still holding conferences about how to fix them.

Don't you think?

You shouldn't give him so much credence. That Kaplan piece was riddled with stereotypes, faulty assumptions, and just plain wrong information. It was pretty atrocious, in fact, and even managed to misconstrue U.S. activity in the country. See Christian's take down of just how thoroughly terrible it is:

http://easterncampaign.wordpress.com/2009/03/26...

That's funny -- Roggio made fun of me hardcore for suggesting that establishing legitimacy and integrating the FATA into mainstream Pakistan was the long-term solution to militancy in the area. I don't trust this poll one bit (there is no way in hell they got a good sample), but it does support my analysis.

Which is nice.

Holy moly. So the purpose of these guys is to perform "community policing," but they don't have a mandate for law enforcement, but they're meant to be later integrated into the police and Army, but they're all about disarming more militias?

None of that makes any sense. They sound like either dead weight on the police force -- little more than security guards with who-knows-what rules of force -- and without the normal accountability structures that actually keep informal forces like Arbakai and Lashkars in line with their specific communities' interests.

Each new detail makes the plan sound worse, not better.

Oh c'mon Spencer -- Kyrgyzstan's human rights record is WAYYYYY better than Uzbekistan's. To equate the two is ridiculous, a different in kind not just degree. If all Tomasky can pull up is a wikipedia article with no other commentary on the actual conditions within both countries, that's just freaking lazy.

Same for you, too. Do your homework -- the two are very different places, and Kyrgyzstan is a fundamentally better place than Uzbekistan (that is, when it comes to government).

Dude. Right on. Ignoring the many other reasons an Awakening won't happen there :-)

Spencer,

ASOP is just the latest in a long line of attempts to create community councils, or community development councils, or shuras, or jirgas, or any similarly-focused program that has been foisted on villages and then underfunded since 2002. It is the latest in a long line of programs meant to establish the district councils mandated by Article 140 of the Afghan Constitution but never implemented.

Gopal isn't doing "great reporting" by talking about it in a vacuum, he is doing it a disservice, since it is structured almost the exact same as the National Solidarity Programme, only it happens to have funding right now.

The only difference between these programs is that they are created under different, parallel initiatives funded by different (mostly European) countries. They look almost all alike because they're the same idea, just executed without coordination -- a far bigger problem, as that gets at accountability, which brings us to Sarah Chayes.

As a longtime resident of Kandahar, Ms. Chayes experiences in person -- she goes to great lengths, and has for years, to demonstrate this -- the corruption that occupies most people's attention EVEN MORE THAN THE TALIBAN. In fact, she explicitly makes the argument that official corruption drives people to support the insurgency -- which is matched by other embedded reporting when journalists bother to get outside the FOB and report on regular, non-military Afghans. In fact, corruption is at the heart for why Hamid Karzai is the exact wrong person to deserve American support in the upcoming election -- because if he wins, nothing will change, and democracy entrenching unpopular corruption is about the worst thing for Afghanistan right now.

So yes, she is talking about out-governing the Taliban. Removing the incentives for supporting the insurgency. Fixing the political reasons behind our failure. Whatever you want to call it, that is what she is talking about. It is far more fundamental than the little-t problem, because without fixing corruption there is nothing to draw the little-t Taliban to.

Which is why I get cranky at all this platitudinous flimflammery masquerading as analysis.

Spencer, I think I should clarify: I only singled you out because I read your site and you were right there in my RSS reader. But you're not alone -- I think this is a problem that is entrenched in the entire foreign policy establishment. Literally everyone does it -- from Kaplan saying we just need to solve India-Pakistan to win, to Rubin and Rashid saying we just need to solve the Durand Line and apply "governance" (both are simplifications, but you get my point).

I think the general bits of what needs to happen has been known for a good six years at this point -- it's why Karzai has been trying to integrate former and current "moderate" Taliban ever since their government fell. But he's had at best spotty success.

Looking at the why behind that, and not just that yet another bi-annual round of "integrating the Taliban" talks is under way, I think, would yield deeper answers. But we're not there yet -- any of us, including me. I know there is a deeper issue at play, whether historical cycles of power-sharing, ethnic conflict patterns, even recent dynamics in community dispute. But I'm not there, so I can't say for sure.

We need to split off reconciliable Taliban. That's settled. I'm just curious as to how. I've not figure it out yet. And we need to be willing to accept that there might not be a way we can. But that kind of theorization hasn't happened yet, at least not publicly. That's what I was getting at.

Spencer, read a book. Karzai has been putting feelers out to the Taliban since 2002.

This is good news -- McKiernan definitely has the right idea (I'd seriously wonder if you can have a "community-based sense of security" AND a "connection to the government" in the heavily tribal areas). This tells me the problem is not lazy theatre commanders, but jerk politicians trying to shortcut their way to the White House.

There are far, far, bigger challenges facing an Anbar-style engagement policy than warlordism (though that is also important). On a basic, level, the entire KLE model in Afghanistan is fundamentally broken. Further, Pashtuns and Arabs don't organize the same way, and don't begin and resolve conflict the same way, either. The two situations are too different to analogize realistically.

Spencer. The U.S. has also denied the Pakistanis shot at its helicopters. And that can happen, and the guys on the ground can be doing the shooting, and nothing must necessarily be wrong with our relationship. Normally, this is the pattern: the U.S. does what it does, the government agrees to it in private but with the understanding that it cannot support it publicly because public opinion is so solidly anti-U.S.

That's not the say the relationship isn't strained for other reasons, but it's a mistake to assume that all discussions happen in public.

I've really enjoyed your dispatches, Spencer, but why did you put up a picture of a PRT in Nuristan? Nuristan is many hundreds of miles away, with a wholly unique ethnic and security and physical environment, and unless I missed something you haven't embedded with a PRT. Is no one there willing to give you a picture of the countryside?

This is a quibble, and a very minor one. Keep it up.

How does being pro-gay imply anything at all on one's valuation of the family? I'm gay, but I love family (and my family especially) and the idea of preserving and safeguarding the family. In fact, I'd like the legal right to have one of my own some day—something currently denied me in my current home state. Why set the two up in opposition to each other? How are they inherently incompatible?