It’s not the Pentagon Papers. After all the noise and controversy, the assessment of the war in Afghanistan by General Stanley McChrystal that was leaked to the Post’s Bob Woodward turns out to be a singularly unsurprising document. Its emphasis isn’t on more troops (which is what all the discussion in Washington inevitably comes down to) but on a better approach to counterinsurgency. It’s a distillation of all the recent discoveries and rediscoveries made by the military under General Petraeus, with the advice of experts like David Kilcullen. As I wrote in my new piece on Richard Holbrooke, these insights are now the lingua franca of the combat units in Afghanistan: make the population the center of effort, focus on politics and information at least as much as fighting, risk your own security more now in order to reduce the risk later. The only surprise is the impressiveness of McChrystal’s analysis. I was wrong in May when I questioned the appointment of a special-operations man to run this war. McChrystal’s report is written in plain English, it’s self-critical, and it shows more understanding of the nature of the fight in Afghanistan than most journalism and academic work. The U.S. military now believes that the Afghan government is just as much a threat to success as the Taliban. That’s a bold conclusion, one that our civilians have not been willing to reach, publicly at least. And the description of the different Taliban networks is as clarifying as it is disturbing.

www.newyorker.com/online/bl...eport.html



Afghanistan drove the British bonkers for much of the 19th century. They couldn't control the place, but they couldn't walk away from it, either. They found that there wasn't a military solution, but there wasn't a non-military solution. It was a question of managing chaos. Sound familiar?

The best answer the British came up with was working with tribal leaders in the border regions -- paying them subsidies, wooing them away from the baddies who genuinely threatened British interests, but otherwise letting them run their own affairs. That was a cynical approach and it left Afghanistan a poor, backward country. But it worked adequately, especially compared with the alternative, which was unending bloodshed in a faraway country that refused to be colonized.

A modern version of this "work with the tribes" approach is still the best answer. And it seems to be an important part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy that was leaked this week. It's dressed up in the language of counterinsurgency -- he speaks of "population-centric" operations, and he uses the word "community" 44 times, by my count. But his assessment is basically a discussion of how to stabilize the country without just shooting people.

uspolitics.einnews.com/news.php


If we had just dropped, instead of the bombs, the equivalent value of dollars on that country, they would be too busy soaking in their new swimming pools to think about jihad . . .