Welcome Back to My Good Graces Tom Friedman . . . Ish Posted by Michael Cohen

After the humanitarian porn that he wrote about Afghanistan on Sunday, I was bit ticked off at Tom Friedman. But nothing like a little realism to turn the tide for old Tom:

America has just adopted Afghanistan as our new baby. The troop surge that President Obama ordered here early in his tenure has taken this mission from a limited intervention, with limited results, to a full nation-building project that will take a long time to succeed — if ever. We came here to destroy Al Qaeda, and now we’re in a long war with the Taliban. Is that really a good use of American power?

At least The Class Too Dumb to Quit is in charge, and they have a strategy: Clear areas of the Taliban, hold them in partnership with the Afghan Army, rebuild these areas by building relationships with district governors and local assemblies to help them upgrade their ability to deliver services to the Afghan people — particularly courts, schools and police — so they will support the Afghan government.

The bad news? This is State-Building 101, and our partners, the current Afghan police and government, are so corrupt that more than a few Afghans prefer the Taliban. With infinite time, money, soldiers and aid workers, we can probably reverse that. But we have none of these. I feel a gap building between our ends and our means and our time constraints. My heart says: Mission critical — help those Afghans who want decent government. My head says: Mission impossible.

This kind of gets to a point I raised yesterday on NPR's On The Point (self-promotion alert) with Max Boot from CFR and Brandon Friedman from VoteVets. Trying to do population centric counter insurgency in Afghanistan is sort of like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Without the necessary host country support the gains we make in Afghanistan are going to be ephemeral at best.

Of course, I can't completely let Friedman off the hook:

Does Mr. Obama understand how much he’s bet his presidency on making Afghanistan a stable country? Too late now. So, here’s hoping that The Class Too Dumb to Quit can take all that it learned in Iraq and help rebuild The Country That’s Been Too Broken to Work.

No, no, no. It's not too late now. And it's not up to the officers in Afghanistan to make this work. They are being given an untenable mission that I'm quite sure they will do everything in their power to ensure succeeds. But it's not clear they have the resources, the time ofe the support to make it succeed. It's up to our political leaders in the Executive Branch and in Congress, not the military, to say enough is enough.

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