The Continuation of Politics

Politics is the reason the U.S. is losing in Afghanistan

Joshua Foust dissects America's failures in Afghanistan:

The biggest barriers to Afghanistan developing economically are political, institutional, and regulatoryâ??not physical or security or investment. Yet, most of the U.S. governmentâ??s efforts to improve Afghanistanâ??s security focus on physical solutions (like expanding the airport in Kandahar to export things like fruit and cement), security solutions (like the Village Security Operations the special operations forces are so enamored with), or foreign direct investment (as the TFBSO is so focused on). They focus on the wrong solutions to the wrong problem.

The U.S. government is not very active in resolving the political issues plaguing Afghanistanâ??s government, or its relationships with Iran and Pakistan, two absolutely crucial prerequisites to it ever becoming a stable country again. We should not expect a particularly successful outcome so long as the politics of the region are relegated to secondary concerns, if they are concerns at all.

I think it's not simply a lack of concern - it's an inability to solve these political problems. It's not as if the U.S. is not trying - perhaps not at the level of the Afghan potato farmers whose plight Foust relays in his post, but certainly at the level of envoys and embassies. To the extent that this hasn't worked, is it really an issue of inattention or simply reflective of the sheer difficulty (impossibility) of the task?

(AP Photo)