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September 18, 2009
The European members of Nato are increasingly unhappy with what is happening in Afghanistan --the bodies of dead soldiers returning to their home countries. This includes the Dutch and the Germans along with non-Europeans --the Canadians.
What is happening is the increasing strength of the Taliban even though Al-Qaeda has been on the retreat for some time. Paul Rogers in Open Democracy says that there are credible reports that:
Taliban elements now have control of most of Afghanistan's second city of Kandahar. This has been achieved not by open fighting but by slow and steady encroachment of one district after another; the movement's advance being aided by disillusion of local populations that have no faith in the ability of the Afghan police or army, let alone foreign forces, to provide security. It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of the takeover of Kandahar. Since 2006, Taliban groups have taken over more rural areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan, and proceeded to establish their own rule of law, tax systems and elements of local administration. They have had less impact in the major towns and cities, however.
Hence the increasing use of the drones as a counter measure to the successes of the insurgency in Afghanistan and the call for ever more troops to fight the insurgency. With the rural areas increasingly insecure, many returning Afghans have migrated to towns and cities, causing rapid urbanisation that is contributing to rising poverty, unemployment and criminality
However, the Americans are optimistic --as always--about the proxy war in Pakistan despite state failure of the Karzai Government in Afghanistan. We are been given a Panglossian view of what can be achieved in Afghanistan against 8 years of experience to the contrary.
How soon do we start hearing about "staying the course" in Af/Pak and war critics "losing their nerve" from those neocons and national security hawks whose agenda for American foreign policy is perpetual, unending war?
The Obama administration's goals in Afghanistan are growing overly ambitious and achieving them is unlikely. The goal is to create an effective central government and that means the Americans will be there for decades. As Marc Lynch points out:
The similarity in American thinking about the role assigned to elections in the Iraqi and Afghan case bears particular attention. In each case, the elections are supposed to do very specific things for American strategy: legitimate the political order, bring excluded challengers into the political process, resolve enduring political conflicts, create a political foundation for the counter-insurgency campaign. In Afghanistan, the opposite appears to have happened.
The logics here are more complex than Brendon Nelson's simplistic fighting totalitarianism (clashing civilizations thesis) as we have local struggles for power, intra-communal struggles for power, struggles among economic competitors, patronage and rent-seeking, and the local security problems among fragmented and competitive armed groups.
Moreover, it does not appear that the Obama administration has begun to take steps to repudiate America's imperial strategy, with its military dominance in the world that encourages other nations to form countervailing coalitions and alliances; or begun to replace this kind of foreign policy with a more restrained and more focused one.
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re "The Obama administration's goals in Afghanistan are growing overly ambitious"
There does seem to be an expansion from Obama's early goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future" and the current one of constructing a stable and functioning Afghan state.
It is the latter which appears to now define the US/Nato mission.