Shooting ourselves in the foot in Afghanistan
Thomas Barnett on the failures of the Obama administration's approach to Afghanistan:
Iraq was a governed space before we got there--a brutal regime no doubt, but a governed space, meaning the capacity was there.The same simply wasn't true of Afghanistan.
We didn't do right by the country for seven years, and now we're trying to cram-course the entire place in a matter of months. Why? Oldest reason in the book: our leadership fears our public.
The damage we do to the "nation" of Afghanistan--along with the region--is one thing. The damage will do to ourselves globally is another.
It's clear that the Obama administration's Afghan surge is a face-saving effort - an attempt to restore enough security so that we can declare victory and "transition" to simply arming our favored thugs to ward off the nastier Taliban. Had we pursued such a strategy from the start, the U.S. would not be facing a huge loss of global credibility. But rather than set a very, very low bar in Afghanistan, we hailed it as the Marshal Plan 2.0.
