Unfortunately over the last year or more, information has been coming in that we are failing to a greater extent in Afghanistan than had been imagined. The trends are negative, and they are not trends that 30,000 or so additional troops are likely to reverse. A good analysis of the situation from an Australian perspective may be found here. On January 22, the NY Times came out with a description of what is happening in the south that is reminiscent of the Russians found themselves in before they left. Our side (U.S., NATO, government forces, etc.) control the major cities and some district capitals most of the time. But the vast majority of the villages are essentially under Taliban control or open to the Taliban whenever they wish to come in. The situation is much the same in the eastern part of the country. In the west and north the situation is better, but even here there have been significant Taliban inroads. Meanwhile, over the border, Pakistan’s army has been making a major effort to reduce the sway of the Taliban in the tribal agencies and the Northwest frontier provinces. Success remains limited. The Taliban have, for example, been able to move beyond the border areas and now control essentially all of the Swat District of NWFP, imposing their fanatical way of life on a formerly moderate people.

On Sunday, the NYTimes “Week in Review” gave the opinion of a number of experts on what was referred to as a developing “quagmire”, with or without the extra troops. The Kabul government is not performing, its agents are widely despised, and its police forces are generally ineffective. We are reminded that with 100,000 troops the Russians were able to do little more than control the cities and maintain logistics routes and provide secure living facilities for their forces. The more effective our forces become, the more they end up killing civilians. For both our forces and the Russians, airpower is regarded as essential for tactical success, and yet after many such successes, we find we have made yet another community turn against us because of the lives and property we have destroyed. In most areas our successes against the insurgents are not followed up with consistent protection of the people. Many Afghans do not like the Taliban, but if they have to exist alongside them, they have to act as though they do. There are too many villages for our forces to do much more.

One solution might be to simply pack up and leave as the British and the Russians did before. However, this would have moral and strategic downsides. In Kabul and other parts of the country we have encouraged people to adopt new values and new hopes and new behaviors that they would have to abandon should we leave. The bravery of school girls in the face of deadly threats suggests how important a new way of life is to these people. People of this kind are still a minority, but yet a vital minority whose protectors the West and the westernized middle classes have become. We should also not lightly abandon the tribal peoples of the west and the north of the country who fought in our cause after 9/11.

Another approach is to rethink our strategy. The first step would be to develop improved relations with Iran and Pakistan. Iran helped us initially. It has many logistics routes we could use. It has historical and ethnic ties to the Hazara and more broadly to the Tajiks (who literature and history is essentially inseparable from that of Iran). Herat was formerly a major Iranian city. Iran continues to provide assistance to Kabul, with which it has close and friendly relations. In the east and south, Pakistan has theoretical control over the longest Afghan border. Historically, it has not controlled many border areas, but it now realizes that it can no longer allow these areas to remain outside its control.

I emphasize improving relations with these states even though they are neither ideal, well-governed, nor reliable. But if they are weak and corrupt, the are still far from being as corrupt and feckless as the Afghan government. Afghanistan has nothing like the well-educated bureaucracies of the civil and military services that Pakistan inherited from the British. If we could develop effective means of dealing with these states, we would have a much more plausible basis for eventual success in Afghanistan.

Within Afghanistan, we should build from our strengths. We should bolster our rear by making more sure than we have that Kabul, Herat, Mazar i Sharif and other relatively peaceful cities remain outside the war zone. Qandahar should perhaps be included in the list even though it is very much in the war zone. (Qandahar is particularly important to the Pashtun section of the population, and thereby to President Karzai. It also has a remarkable group of anti-Taliban, pro-women’s education advocates.) We should strengthen those leaders in the north and west who reject the Taliban. By various inducements, we may be able to modify their addictions to drugs and corruption and gradually make certain parts of the country into models for the rest. The Hazarajat, the land of the Hazara shi’a minority, is prepared to defend itself against the hated Taliban. These are the areas in which we should emphasize development projects, the training of police and judges, etc.

In the east and south, we should initially try to reach a stalemate with tactics similar to those we have followed up to now. But our side should strive to rely less on air power, since the potential for error is not going to go away. We should also reduce the number of offensive operations. The goal should be to give whoever we contact a sense that they can rely on us to protect them if they assist us. We might try in a few areas to resurrect CAP units like the Marines used in Vietnam. This meant that a platoon would establish itself in a village (“hamlet” in Vietnam terminology) and stay there as they trained the local self-defense forces and helped local development. The approach worked quite well. (For more on this see the book “Can We Win in Vietnam?”) In areas where this model started to work in Afghanistan, more villages might gradually be included. Note, however, that real progress beyond this stalemate would depend on the effectiveness of an increasing effort by the Pakistanis in border areas — supported indirectly by American military and nonmilitary assistance. This includes education.

Note that we are talking here of a long term strategy. The Australian analysis referenced above was developed on the basis of a fifteen year stay. This will be possible only if we show some progress.

One hates to admit that this is probably right. The two state solution opportunity has vanished, destroyed by the ambitions of the radical settlers who believe all of Palestime is their god-given inheritance.

In a recent Op-Ed, Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, has argued that the only solution is a one-state solution with an elected government for all people living in Palestine. This seems right, for it would lay the basis for a truly democratic state, something that a state founded on a particular religion can never achieve. However, the fact that the Arabs would soon outnumber the Jews also makes this a nonstarter.

The only hope has to be growth in the strength of moderates on both sides. On the Arab side, the moderates have been seriously weakened by Israeli actions, such as its decimation of Gaza. It is unlikely that Fatah would be able to negotiate anything but the most pro-Arab and thus most unlikely agreement under present conditions. The Israelis have many moderates, one of whom hopes to become their leader in the near future, but the record of their being able to significantly alter what the Arabs see on the ground is not promising. They have not controlled the settlements in the past: how could they destroy the homes of hundreds of thousands of Israelis and move them out after an ageement? Sixty Minutes suggested that the army would simply not carry out such orders.

It is well to remember that the Russians went through approximately the same effort that we are making, and with about twice the number of troops we have. It was also a high-tech effort. It is also useful to remember that their chief human rights achievement, like ours, was to raise the status of women. They also had their Afghan government and their projects. But in the end, they decided to give it up. Their regime collapsed and the Taliban eventually conquered most of the country.

Some conclude that adding more troop would be repeating the errors of the Russians and the British before them. They argue that we have little need to control Afghanistan, that the Taliban are no threat to us, and that they will not automatically harbor al-Qaeda.

But their arguments are too facile. The Taliban represent the worst of Islam. We have developed oases in the country in which a more humane life style is widely accepted. Were we to leave, we would be abandoning millions of the country’s most promising citizens to severe repression. We cannot easily avoid this responsibility.

This leaves the observer in a quandary. We appear to be losing ground. The more we fight, the more civilians we kill, the more enemies we have. I have many different suggestions, as do others, but how to make the most fundamental decision, more troops or less, escapes me.

I assume part of the reason for this omission is the general assumption that success in Iraq rides of the shoulders of the Shi’a majority. This ignores the very real probability that the Sunni will once again lead the country, a hope that the Sunni resistance certainly clings to. As I have pointed out before in these blogs, minorities frequent lead countries, often for centuries. The role of the Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi is a well-known example. This suggests that developing alliances with Sunni movements in the west and north of the country may be more fruitful than it appears at first.

Of course, one of the problems with getting out of any situation, is that if one stayed just a little longer, it might turn around. There are always indications that “things are about to change”. Yet it is always possible that in this instance, they are.

Second, although the editorial advocates negotiations with neighboring states, it does this in a decidedly American-centered, imperialist manner. The editors write that we should negotiate with neighboring states “to avoid excessive meddling in Iraq”. The editors seem to forget that we do not own Iraq. We are not the people who will have to live alongside the results of America’s “excessive meddling” for the next generation. We would lay a much firmer basis for our withdrawal, were we to include neighbors more positively in our plans, eliciting their ideas as to how we should withdraw and what they could do to help.

Iraq should have taught us the “doing things our way” can be disastrous. Let us try a new approach.

I am afraid that corruption is only one of the failings of this enclave that is often pictured as a shining exception. Politically, the area is two areas, ruled for years by strong tribal leaders exercising what is essentially dictatorial powers. Half is run by the KDP under the Barzanis, the other half by the PUK under the Talabanis (Talibani is also the current President of Iraq — “President” being a largely ceremonial post). PUK and the KDP are actually modern versions of long-standing tribal alliances, alliances that have often fought each other as much as the outside world. Barzani even invited Saddam in to help him with one of these contests in the 1990s. Later, the two groups “made up”, at least temporarily, forming an alliance that is still maintained

The elections that have been held recently reflect absolute internal control within the subregions. As one reporter recently wrote here : “These areas should not be confused with democracies. They are one-party statelets little different from places like Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, both secular U.S.-aligned dictatorships run by and for a clique of clans unafraid to maintain their rule through force.”

I agree with Friedman that we should help preserve the level of security and welfare and progress that the Kurds have achieved. But we should be preserving it not so much as a example of our success in bringing democracy to the Middle East, but as an example of the level of achievement that it is rational at this point in the political development of the area to aspire to. Our mistake in Iraq was to imagine that the Iraqis wished to and could establish thriving democratic institutions. We might have done better to have helped Baath civilian and military leaders form a government based on Iraqi values and abilities, a government that we could have turned over the country to long before now. In accepting and defending the emerging Kurdish state or “autonomous province” in the old Soviet terminology, we would be demonstrating that we can work with partial solutions to the problem of governance, solutions that are more democratic than exist now in most of the area and yet fall short of, and will for many years continue to fall short of Western ideals.

The fighting between the two factions, and even within these factions, unfortunately reminds many of the internecine bloodshed that consumes Iraq and seems to be a precursor of the kind of factional infighting that may ravage Iraq if and when the Americans finally leave.

In the June 25 New Yorker, Hersh zeroes in on the efforts of General Taguba to look into and report fairly on the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and, by extension, at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Taguba had been asked by the Pentagon to investigate what went on in Abu Ghraib, and who knew what when.

Taguba’s conclusions were that events at Abu Ghraib were well known all along. In fact, they had brought an expert from Guantanamo to introduce some of the measures used at Abu Ghraib. There were copious photos available for people at many levels to see and they had been ignored or dismissed. His conclusion was that what went on at Abu Ghraib was part of a pattern and not an isolated aberration by underlings.

However, on repeated occasions, before committees of Congress and elsewhere, Taguba was contradicted, put down, and dismissed. The brass above him simply lied about what they knew and what had come up to their level months before it all became public. In spite of the fact Taguba had done exactly the job he was asked to do, he was sidelined for the next two years and asked to resign early. They do shoot the messenger.

But it is more than that. Top persons in the government, presumably including the President and the Vice-President, although Taguba’s research did not actually go to these levels, appear to have concluded early on that “do whatever you have to do” was to be the guiding principal behind interrogations. What we saw in the pictures was, at least in part, the result of an deliberate policy of getting the military police and jail keepers to “soften up” prisoners so that information could be more readily extracted from them. There was, incidentally, little or no attempt to investigate whether the individual prisoners softened up were at all likely to have the information that was to be extracted from them.

Our campaign against al-Qaeda and the Islamists has been seriously compromised by our treatment of prisoners in the eyes of much of the world. This is not to say, that extreme situations do not require extreme solutions. It is to say that we must take much more seriously than we have the establishment and adherence to acceptable limits on the way in which we treat those who comes into our control.