If only a little of the humility President Obama regularly expresses would rub off on some others in Washington. Tom Friedman expresses the more usual Washington hubris when he says the US should tell the president of Afghanistan to shape up or ship out:
For my money, though, I wish there was less talk today about how many more troops to send and more focus on what kind of Afghan government we have as our partner...
We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people.
If Karzai says no, then there is only one answer: "You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this." (Cue the helicopters.)
Oblivious imperial arrogance like this is guaranteed to undercut even the most well-intentioned policies. If this is conventional wisdom in Washington, I hold out little hope for a new and improved Afghanistan strategy.
Zbigniew Brzezinski has his flaws, but he's been studying Afghanistan for a long time, and he can recognize hypocrisy, as well as hubris, when he sees it:
Let's just keep our mouth shut on this issue [the corruption of the Karzai administration] and not discredit ourselves by yapping away all the time about corruption. I mean, who are we to be talking about corruption? Look at Wall Street, how our financial system is totally corrupt these days. Look how we conduct our elections, on the basis of private donations. Look who are our ambassadors, to the most important countries - people who bought the ambassadorships.
Who are we to be preaching corruption, or anti-corruption, to the rest of the world? Politics is politics. Every country has its own traditions and ways of doing things. If there's someone else who has the support of Afghans, let him surface. But we're not running Afghanistan. We're finding it hard even to wage a counter-insurgency. How can we be getting engaged in transforming its politics, building some sort of a different political culture in Afghanistan. This is really crazy.
If only that kind of clarity were as catching as the swine flu.
There are fewer than 100 al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. They have no bases and no ability to launch attacks on either America or America's allies. The Taliban is not al Qaeda. By most reports, al Qaeda has caused too much trouble for the Taliban to even be welcome in that country as far as the Taliban are concerned. Why then is the US conflating the two?
It's absurd to be trying to quell, at the cost of billions of dollars and hundreds of lives, violence that's being caused by nothing but your own presence.
In short, the stated goals for the Afghan War have been achieved. It's time to declare victory and send the combat troops home. Temporary peacekeeping troops and long-term non-military engagement to help Afghans rebuild their country after its decades of war are what should take their place.