President Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional U.S. troops to send to the battle.
Obama made the request in a meeting Monday with Vice President Biden and a small group of senior advisers helping him decide whether to expand the war. The detail he is now seeking also reflects the administration's turn toward Afghanistan's provincial governors, tribal leaders and local militias as potentially more effective partners in the effort than a historically weak central government that is confronting questions of legitimacy after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.
Good. We need to go local and bypass Kabul by understanding that there is no central government capable of running all of Afghanistan. As I wrote 10 months ago:
The end result in Afghanistan, if all goes well, will be a nominal national government that controls the capital region and reigns but does not rule local tribes and which actually helps the locals a bit rather than sucking resources from the locals, who in turn do not make trouble for the central government or allow their areas to be used by jihadis to plan attacks on the West. We press for reasonable economic opportunities, with bribes all around (I mean, foreign aid), to keep a fragile peace.
And we stick around this time, unlike after the Soviets left Afghanistan when we ignored the place, for a generation or two to see if we can move Afghanistan into the 19th century (hey, let's not get ahead of ourselves).
The Westphalian impulse to treat only Kabul as the legitimate reperesentative of all that lies within the geography of "Afghanistan" must be ignored to deal with the reality of provinces, valleys, and villages that are their own little worlds with little regard for the foreigners in Kabul.
Not that this focus should be an excuse to abandon defeating the Taliban. The nominal central government's inability to defeat the Taliban should be no excuse for retreating from Afghanistan. Going local should be about learning how to defeat the Taliban with the right tools.
