Paul Miller puts Afghanistan into perspective:
The missing ingredient is more civilian aid. Secretary Clinton touted that the U.S. mission in Kabul now comprises some 1,100 diplomats and civilian experts, which roughly doubles or triples the presence we had prior to 2009. Add together all the soldiers serving on Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and you have several thousand more. This is still not enough. At its peak, the Allies deployed something like 63,000 people who were directly engaged with rebuilding the government and economy of West Germany after World War II. I know the cases are hardly comparable for a thousand reasons -- but most points of difference say that rebuilding Afghanistan is harder than West Germany, and so it likely needs more help, not less. All the biggest remaining challenges in Afghanistan that we have not moved to address in the last year or so -- corruption, institutional weakness, poor governance -- are civilian, not military in nature. More civilians would be the gamechanger that could change Afghanistan from a half-baked muddle-through to an outright success.Afghanistan is winnable. We're almost there. The president's policy has many decent elements to it. But it is being sold under a stale, worn, and out-of-date headline and a poor strategic communications strategy. And it does not recognize the depth of Afghanistan's need for civilian assistance. Change that, and we will be able to look back with pride on what the United States and our allies helped achieve in Afghanistan.
Comparing Afghanistan to post-war Germany only underscores the massive difference in stakes between the two efforts. A failure to rebuild Germany after World War II would have had serious repercussions in Europe, and vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. A failure to rebuild Afghanistan would have consequences as well, but not nearly on par with that of failure in post-war Germany. Yet we've embarked on a strategy for Afghanistan that is so ambitious that even its advocates concede it's more resource-intense and difficult than the reconstruction of Germany.
But Miller does have a point - for better or worse, the administration has chosen a strategy that requires a massive infusion of American resources but, like the Bush administration before them, have tried to cut corners, all in the name of shielding the vast majority of the American public from the costs of the strategy they've embarked on.
