I Don't Know the Answer to This Question

When one man, Abdul Hanan, complained that “more people are dying,” First Lt. Jake Weldon told him that the Taliban “take away your schools, they take away your hospitals; we bring those things.”

Mr. Hanan remained doubtful. Some people have fled the area, fearful of violence since the Marines have arrived. He asked, “So you want to build us a hospital or school, but if nobody is here, what do we do?”

Read the whole article. The Marines have a near-impossible task in Afghanistan, given the size of Helmand Province.[1] Hamid Karzai, the Mayor of Kabul President of Afghanistan, has been on the job for nearly eight years (he was installed by the Bush Administration until he won the election five years ago). There is no meaningful local security force in Afghanistan, leaving it to NATO and the Americans to supply security.[2]

The problem there, of course, is that Afghans have a long history of limited willingness to tolerate the presence of foreign forces. The Taliban's leadership are a brutal bunch, but they are Pashtuns, which make up over 40% of the population.

The West (NATO and the U.S. commands) has been in Afghanistan for nearly eight years. It can be argued that the window for a favorable outcome has come and gone. We cannot flood the country with troops. Afghanistan has far rougher terrain, few paved roads and is nearly 50% larger than Iraq and we have far, far fewer troops in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

According to Unicef, the literacy rate for young people (15-24) in Afghanistan is 49% for men, 18% for women; the corresponding statistics for Iraq are 89% and 81%. Faced with widespread illiteracy (the numbers are undoubtedly worse in the remote areas that are under Taliban control), the geniuses running this war only now have figured out that they should use radio stations to try to reach the Afghanis.

The Taliban have the support of enough people to win an insurgency. They have a place of refuge, where western forces cannot go. And they have funding, both from the growing of opium and the sale of heroin into the wholesale black market and from elements of the Pakistani intelligence community. If we cannot break at least one of the three legs of their insurgency, we can stay and pour in more troops and all we are doing is running up the butcher's bill, for they will outlast us.

And therein lies the answer to Mr. Hanan's question.

[1]I saw "near-impossible" because the Marines have a well-deserved reputation of accomplishing the impossible.

[2]The blame for the failure to build up any sort of meaningful indigenous security forces rests with the Bush Administration, which starved the effort in Afghanistan in order to go on Bush's Most Glorious Iraqi Adventure.