I have read that Obama is considering a redefinition of the mission of our troops to be that of fighting Al Qaeda rather than the Taliban or any of the tribal warlords in Afghanistan.
I wonder when will we learn that our CIA's covert actions against the ungoverned areas we wish to control never seem to allow us to avoid wars from which it is impossible to extricate ourselves either by choosing to dominate or to submit.
Afghanistan is the very model of an ungoverned area. Since the days of Alexander the great empires like the Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Persians, British, Russians and now the US have rarely managed to unify this land of different interests as a stable nation that they could mold to their interests without widespread corruption.
To govern any area you must first unify it as a nation. To build a nation you build infrastructure. To be able to build infrastructure you must establish law and order. To have law and order you need to choose wise leaders who can't be corrupted, coopted, distracted or worked around.
In the United States we have a nation with infrastructure and with us in control of the government its still hard to govern.
In Afghanistan any one of the potential groups who now have the strength to build a nation also have the potential to lead it to disaster with lawlessness and greed. Perhaps the alternative is to accept the concept of an ungoverned area the way we do the internet.
In many ways what Al Qaeda, sometimes called the list or the base did, is spread the concept of an ungoverned area through the rest of the Muslim world where people are tired of corrupt governments profiting at their expense. If we go after them now we are back to the concept of a global war. The way I read Obama's decision is that we will now extend the borders of our Afghanistan quagmire to include Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia just as we extended the quagmire of Vietnam to include Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. That doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
Afganistan most prominently borders the oil rich regions of the Caspian where it touches on the now independent stans of Russia and Iran; Pakistan where it connects to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden through the old Persian province of Baluchistan including a proposed route for a pipeline which would have allowed the Caspian oil to pass into the Gulf of Aden outside the straits of Hormuz; and China where a pipeline through Waristan might bring the Capian oil east instead of west.
The basic problem of government in the ungoverned areas is that there is no infrastructure. With a national per capita income of $40 a year that includes the urban areas most people in the tribal regions alog the Afghan / Pakistan border clearly have no legitimate income. In order to live they engage in smuggling, banditry, poppie growing, heroin distribution and guarding their tribal warlords territories.
Since the sixties when its last stable government was visited by the Kennedy's, Afghanistan hasn't been a country, its been an ungoverned area with several loose confederations of tribal and religious warlords powerful enough to dominate the trade routes as they approach urban areas along the borders.
If you examine the power bases of our adversaries most of them have at one time or another been in and out of alliances with one another as common cause dictates.
Some were students together protesting the last established government. One or two were religious leaders seeking to build a nation, some were simply corrupt peasants struggling for the opportunity to grab power and riches offered by many decades of constant war and many others were tribal leaders. Often as not it has been the followers rather than the leaders who have indulged in the worst excesses.
We could choose to get bogged down building bases, supplying them, sending more troops and trying to keep an eye on the violence in the ungoverned areas, or we could try to solve the infrastructure problem. Imagine the difficulty of trying to educate the people as to why they need to be a nation or have any sort of national organization. We have trouble doing it here in the United States where we can't get single payer healthcare or a public option past our corrupt officials.
They live in an ungoverned area loosely organized by tribal authorities, religion and common law obligations to kin and clan. The cities might get to where there could someday be national elections that accurately reflected their concerns but the coutryside is simply not there yet.
We have tried supporting the Taliban as a source of a stable government, but didn't like the consequence of some of Mulla Omars followers replacement of the lawlessness with strict sharia law.
The country might have been unified under Mohammed Omar but the Pakistan ISI dominated control of the country north of Kabul didn't work.
We tried arming warlords and mujahadin in regional alliances, such as the Northern alliance of Tajik, Uzbek and Hazarrah warlords that held out against the Pashtun Taliban victories.
We brought back Karsai from his life as a Cambridge, MA restraunteur and the son of a supposed successor to the last legitimate king to rule a loyla jurga which was Mulla Omars traditional Pashtun means of organization that was adopted by the Taliban.
We tried to work with an Eastern alliance. They proved untrustworthy and bribable. All we have really accomplished in eight years is to pick off any individuals who had the potential to lead and make the situation worse.
We have tried most viable options and they haven't worked. It seems to late to say "Hey how about letting us try again under new management?" What we have on our hands now is a mess that we should sensibly walk away from. All we have done over the last eight years is kill a lot of people and make things worse.