Afghan Mission Creep

En-route to Europe, Secretary Clinton lambasted the aid programs inside Afghanistan for the past seven years as being "heartbreaking" in their futility. To which one might reasonably ask, as compared to what?

If the purpose of the American effort inside Afghanistan is to build a better Afghanistan, then yes, that aid has been wasted. If the effort is designed to uproot the al Qaeda network, then it has evidently succeeded, as that network is now in Pakistan.

It's fairly amusing to listen to the howls of outrage in Washington about the rampant corruption inside Afghanistan. What exactly did we expect to happen when we suddenly dump billions of dollars on a subsistence-level economy? (Dump a few million in Illinois and ask me how the former Governor would have handled it.) Now, we're supposed to believe that because it's Ambassador Holbrooke and Secretary Clinton doing the dumping - and promising vague benchmarks - that somehow this corruption will vanish?

It's no knock on their evident skills or intellect to acknowledge that social engineering on this scale is extraordinarily difficult. What's more, we have put ourselves in what looks like an untenable situation. Even if we succeed in Afghanistan, al Qaeda appears capable of moving elsewhere. Then what? A similar effort in Somalia? Yemen? Sudan?

We need to think about the problem of Islamic terrorism differently, not pretend that different bureaucrats have unlocked a heretofore unknown combination of bribes and combat power to make Afghanistan whole again.