"We squandered the troop surge," says Rajiv Chandrasekaran, author of Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, "because of this nasty bickering in Washington."
Much of the tension centered around Richard Holbrooke, the veteran diplomat appointed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in early 2009 to be the point man for Afghanistan policy. Holbrooke was brought in to try to forge a path toward peace talks with the Taliban, essentially ending a decade-long war. But he was undermined, says Chandrasekaran, by the White House and even members of his own team.
But what does negotiating with the Taliban have to do with this problem cited in the article?
"What we fail to understand was that the Afghan people largely wanted to be left alone and they hate their government, in many cases, as much as they hate the insurgents. And when we went to them and said, 'Ah, we're coming here to help bring your government to you.' They said, 'Whoa we don't want out government!' "
I agree that trying to create a centralized Afghan government is a mistake. I said so before the surge:
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.
Truth be told, if this is all that Chandrasekaran highlighted, I'd have no problem with the criticism. I'm still not sure if we are trying to base victory on a stronger central government or working with locals for security and governance.
This issue of governance structure is completely separate from the issue of negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban. If talking is meant to pry away the less fanatical Taliban supporters by getting them to agree to live under he new order in order to isolate and defeat the hard core Taliban, that's fine. We did that in Iraq with the Awakening.
But if talking is for the purpose of letting the Taliban win in some areas in exchange for not shooting at us while we withdraw, that's actually a defeat no matter how much it is disguised as a triumph of diplomacy.
And basing a book advocating talks with the Taliban on the vaunted talents of Holbrooke to deliver a diplomatic coup is nonsense.
