I NEVER believed we should be in these wastelands with these people. They have a standard of living and thinking well before the age of the Greek or Roman empires.

But it’s Obamy’s war now. We’ll see what real genius can do.

Gandomak, btw, which is mentioned in the story, is the same place where the British army of General Elphinstone was finally destroyed during the First Afghan War back in (I think) 1847. Only one man survived to bring the story back to India. There’s a warning there for us about what could happen if we don’t raise our game over there.

The guy is right. If we want them to switch to traditional grain crops, it is going to take a certain amount of infrastructure to make that possible. These people are poor and uneducated but they understand things like food and money. They aren’t going to grow a crop they can’t get to market. We don’t have to do their work for them, but we can act as an enabling mechanism. Ever try to grow/harvest/transport wheat by hand? These people don’t even have a high-school education and over half of them can’t read. If there is a market for opium and they can grow it and get it to market with the resources they have available, they are going to do it rather than plant wheat and let it rot in the field and then starve the following winter for lack of cash.

I don’t think it is unreasonable that if we demand they change crops, we at least see that they have the infrastructure that it takes to support those crops. Irrigation and roads are pretty darned basic requirements.

But we aren’t going to be able to do that until we have troops that are in those areas all the time. We have to have enough troops to “clear and hold” rather than clear here and clear there and clear someplace else and the Taliban just come back when we move someplace else.

BTW-I wonder how many times that farmer sent his sons to town after making them swallow heroin-condoms? Good mules are hard to come by.

The culture has no real concept of a nation state and strong central government. There is more identity to the tribe (clan) and local strongman (lord) than to any politicians in Kabul. We keep insisting on looking at things through our cultural eyes. It is going to take a LONG time to get the notion of a central government instilled in the culture. At minimum two generations, probably three.

And the way you start is to create national lines of communications. You need roads, you need a single central language, common radio and television communications in that language. You need to raise a generation that grows up in an Afghanistan where tribal boundaries are weaker and they share more in common culturally with kids the same age in all parts of the country. Right now a kid from the Southwest of Afghanistan can’t even understand a kid for Northeast Afghanistan if they were face to face talking to each other. They speak different languages and identify as parts of different nations. One identifies as Pashtun, the other Uzbek,

Afghanistan is more an effort in nation building than in insurgency fighting. We need communications both in travel of people and goods and in electronic and written. We need education, and we need strong national institutions to create a sense of nationality of Afghan. People need to move around, fall in love, marry people from other tribes … over time blurring the clan boundaries and creating a national identity that replaces it. Highways, trains, markets, communications. Until we start that … we are wasting our time

“The world gave millions of dollars, but our government and elders stole that money. Where is my road and the irrigation channel?” says the farmer from the village of Toto.

Absolutely right, crosspatch. This is the problem with filtering aid through local governments – they don’t bother with the public works, they just line their own pockets.

That is exactly how you lose an insurgency. You do *NOT* make promises that you can’t deliver on. If we promised them a road, an irrigation channel, and a clinic, then it should have been provided. You don’t promise infrastructure until you can actually provide what you promise. Failing to deliver drives the population away from the government and makes it harder to be credible in the future.

We have shot ourselves in the foot with this one.

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