Afghanistan, again

After my dithering the other day, I decided to actually go read Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s memo about the situation in Afghanistan. While the media reports have focused largely on his request for more troops, that’s not really what the memo is about about.

There are two big takeaways from this memo, as far as I’m concerned:

• America and its NATO allies have so far fought the war in Afghanistan horribly, committing too few resources and soldiers – thanks again for Iraq, President Bush! — and not using the resources and soldiers it has in an effective manner: Not bothering, really, to learn the local culture or take the steps to attract the support and assistance of common Afghanis. These are things that America can change and fix — and if it were simply a matter of making these changes, I’d be more enthusiastically rooting for the continuation of the war.

• But there’s a problem that America, really, can’t so easily fix: The Afghan government. It’s ineffective and corrupt. Period. And while the Taliban is hardly popular among Afghanis, its ability to offer effective, corruption-free — though certainly brutal — governance in the areas it holds make it, for many Afghanis, a tolerable alternative to the current government and its Western allies. This is not my liberal whiny projection: This is McChrystal’s analysis.

Winning the war, McChrystal says, will require remaking the Afghan government into an effective, relatively uncorrupt institution that can win the support of its own people. But where he’s fairly specific about what the U.S. can do to improve its efforts in Afghanistan, he’s rather less so when it comes to improving Afghani governance. There’s stuff the U.S. can to do assist that process, but it will have to be done by the Afghanis themselves.

Given what we know of Afghanistan’s history, do we really want to commit the lives of more American soldiers to fighting there on the hope the country’s native government will get its act together?

McChrystal is, from what I can tell, honorable and smart. He wants to win the war he’s been given, and that’s his job. But his analysis about how to win the war has a gaping hole that I’m not sure can be filled. Perhaps it’s time for the U.S. to give up the nation-building mission, leave Afghanis to make or unmake their own culture, and focus solely on military actions that bloody Al Qaeda’s nose. This is far from a perfect solution; there probably are no perfect solutions.