Karzai asks US to Stop the Planes

I'm watching 60 Minutes right now. It's a segment on bombings in Afghanistan: specifically, a bombing that killed nine civilians in a small village. Hamid Karzai, President of Afghanistan, asks the United States to roll back its bombings. He believes that the bombings hurt more than they help.

The resurgence of Taliban forces in Afghanistan is usually overshadowed by the bigger problems in Iraq. But it should be troubling to us nonetheless. According to a Wall Street Journal article from October 14th, Tangling with the Taliban, there are still over 40,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, with many of them working to stop Taliban forces which number between five and twenty thousand - it's hard to tell.
NATO forces have to pick up a lot of slack when the Afghan government can't provide basics, often taking up police duties in troubled areas.


A New York Times article from August 12, How a 'Good War' In Afghanistan Went Bad, quoted a high-level American commander in Afghanistan who argued that the US has failed to provide the proper sorts of experts to help build the Afghani infrastructure. For example, the official says that there are only a handful of American agriculture experts helping in agriculture, which is 80% of the Afghan economy.

A former CIA official, Robert Grenier, contended that the CIA shifted its best counterterrorism agents to Iraq. It's hard to question the article's logic: if not for the war in Iraq, our most qualified people would all be in Afghanistan. But things looked pretty good in spring of 2005.

Except for one thing: the Taliban forces weren't defeated; they were in Pakistan. And they came back in spring of 2006.

It's not as bad as it could be; it's not as bad as Iraq. Still, just looking through the news reports, it's not hard to see that, if not for the war in Iraq, things could be much, much better. There were a few of us, at the time, who said that the United States should make sure it takes care of the one country it took over before it tries to take over another.

It's far too late for that now. As long as we're tied down in Iraq, we will have to rely on blunt measures like air strikes is because our troops and special forces are in Iraq. So here's another reason to create Kurdistan* and balance our forces. We still owe a lot to the people of Afghanistan.

*I know this isn't realistic at the moment.