Leaving Afghanistan to Those Who Live There

Simon Jenkins has a blistering piece in the Guardian about the British commitment to Afghanistan:

When Britain ruled the adjacent Punjab, its power was based on a large land army and the belief that it would never leave. It sent out its brightest and best. They stayed, and those who collaborated with them prospered. Today those who collaborate are murdered and night letters are pinned to their doors.

Everyone knows that the British will go but the Taliban will stay. That is why the strategy of take, hold and build is mere pastiche imperialism. It relies on the palpable nonsense that the Afghan army, a drugged militia of little competence and less loyalty, will fight and defeat its Pashtun cousins. It will not.

The British may leave, but I'm not altogether sure the U.S. will. Again, it all comes back to a admittedly complicated cost benefit analysis. After we pour billions of dollars and suffer hundreds more casualties, will we be correspondingly safer from Islamic terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland? I'm not sure.

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The body of a suspected Taliban fighter lies on an Afghan roadside. Photo credit: AP Photos