The New York Times reported Tuesday that Ahmed Wali Kharzai, brother of Afghan president Hamid Kharzai (currently arranging the theft of a runoff election) is on the CIA payroll and waist-deep in the opium trade.
American strategy for the last eight years has been dominated by used-carpet salesmen pretending to serve our, and their own nation’s, interests while actually serving their own.
At the moment, the administration is looking at protecting Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad and a few other village clusters, officials said. The first of any new troops sent to Afghanistan would be assigned to Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital, seen as a center of gravity in pushing back insurgent advances.
But military planners are also pressing for enough troops to safeguard major agricultural areas, like the hotly contested Helmand River valley, as well as regional highways essential to the economy — tasks that would require significantly more reinforcements beyond the 21,000 deployed by Mr. Obama this year.
So what’s an armchair-general to do? It’s easy to say the United States should just up and remove itself, but that won’t work. The entire operation exists under the auspices of the United Nations (PDF) and NATO — which makes this week’s attack on a UN guesthouse all the more understandable.
My guess: Obama will secure the main population centers, patrol the highways by air, try some civil society and development initiatives, and continue a quiet effort to engage the Taliban and separate them from al-Qaeda. The real question is whether he can engage new partners outside of Kabul and stop relying on just two unruly personalities.
