REALLY?
Well I really hope I am not pulling this quote out of context.......with what you are saying and kinda tryin to explain here.
Look, we lob a bomb into a place take out 5 civilians here 20 there, 7 somewhere else, after 10 years it adds up. After 10 years of "restraint" we end up killing a lot more civilians than if we had just gone in after the bad guys in the first place.
We end up drawing it out, we enable them to fight longer. So we take great pains to avoid civilian casualties but sometimes some get in the way anyway. Too often we let the bad guys off the hook in order to avoid hurting people. It is my belief that policy like that ends up getting MORE civilians killed in the long run. Just in fewer numbers in each incident but you have more such incidents over a longer period.
It enables the enemy to fight longer and the people pay no price for enabling that behavior by performing such tasks as running ammunition for them.
But having said all of that, what would we give them in its place? A corrupt Karsai administration? That is where we would need a second "prong" of action. The corruption in the government of Afghanistan needs to be eliminated. The problem with that is that what we see as "corruption" is the cultural norm in that and many other places in the world. What we call bribery is the normal course of doing business in that part of the world and has been for a thousand years or more.
It takes THREE GENERATIONS to build a nation. People in Afghanistan do not identify as Afghans. They identify as Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazeris, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Baluchi, and all sorts of others. They don't even speak a single language as a nation. Most do speak either Dari (in the North) or Pashto (in the South) but there are over 30 languages and dialects there. Third languages such as Naristani and Uzbeki are spoken across fairly large areas.
First, in order to build a cohesive nation, you need a common language and a common culture. Afghanistan should, in my opinion, engage in a massive electronic communications project providing news, educational and entertainment programming by radio across the nation in Dari. There should be content for all ages but in particular the children. What this does is gives children growing up all across the country some common culture. They can all talk about some show they liked to listen to when they were kids, for example, and have common songs and rhymes and such. Many of the various tribal proverbs and stories can be translated into Dari and shared with the rest of the country, too, creating a sort of "melting pot" of culture.
At the same time there needs to be a system of reasonable communications by the creation of a road and rail net that interconnects the country. An analog in the US might be the old US route system of highways and a rail construction program about like that of the mid 18th century here. Afghanistan currently has one railroad under construction and none in operation.
Now, once you have some semblance of a common culture and a communications mechanism, people start moving goods around. Now lets say you want to build a bridge, a dam, a mine, or a road. Bring workers from one region into a different region to work. Get them away from their "tribal elders" and into a different town in a different part of the country. So now you have a generation that is brought up exposed to a common language, common culture, and can move around. Now Pashtuns begin to marry Uzbeks. Tajiks begin to marry Hazeris. The tribal identity begins to fade and the national identity begins to take its place.
The first generation will have a hard go of it because their parents are still of the "old" way and will not approve of many of the things the younger ones are doing. The second generation will have an easier to go of it and that will be where things turn. Only when the third generation comes into the society on its own will the transition be complete and people really consider themselves Afghans.
But you can't have any of that while people are running around blowing shit up. It can cost millions to build a road and it can be destroyed with a few hundred bucks worth of fertilizer. This notion of trying hard to hold the "civilian" population harmless from the acts of the Taliban is just making the problem worse. The Taliban COME from the local population. Until they pay a price for supporting that crap, it will continue forever. So if you go in, tell the population of a town that THEY will be held responsible for what goes on and if it continues, the town will cease to exist, it gives them a very real stake in what goes on. I believe it would have to actually be done in only a very small number of cases, maybe one or two. Once the people realize that this is serious business, they stop tolerating the bullshit.
But then there is the third issue and that is protection of the world heroin supply. If we got too effective at eliminating opium in the area, very powerful politicians around the world who are financed by very powerful global mobsters are going to start agitating to get out in order to protect their supply of opium. Its a mess.
But the bottom line is that until the people actually pay some kind of real tangible price for supporting the Taliban, that isn't going to change. And until some effort is made to produce some sort of national identity things aren't going to change. And doing that is going to take somewhere between 50 and 75 years.
It took 150 years in this country from the time of the House of Burgesses to the Continental Congress. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were the third generation of his family here. The first generation came over, and their grandchildren were the generation that identified as "American" and not British.
But right now I think it all hinges on corruption. Until we can present them with an alternative to the Taliban that isn't corrupt, we are pissing in the wind. Once we do, the Taliban really have nothing else to offer.
Pabst Blue Ribbon - The beer that made Gerlach famous.
