Afghanistan: Changing Cultures Is Hard

Fareed Zakaria suggests that we pay off Afghans to keep al Qaeda at bay. Earlier this month, Kimberly Martin said this is precisely what the British attempted to do. And they failed miserably.

Indeed, this is what we tried to do shortly after 9/11. We paid Afghans to go hunt bin Laden. They took our money and then let him get away. It's not too difficult to imagine such a thing happening over and over.

And this gets to the central problem with any "Af-Pak" strategy: changing cultures is hard. Changing people's beliefs, interests, and loyalties is hard. Social engineering is hard.

That we have come to believe that such a practice is vital to our security says more about our pervasive sense of our security needs, I think, than about the objective situation.

(AP Photos)