The philosophy is, If one doesn’t have any thing he would certainly have no fear to lose. To create the sense of personal ownership individually in the Afghan society you cannot make them responsible to protect it.

But what we have continiously exercising the same mistake by military solutions, we actually are keeping them busy in wars and only developing their warrior skills.

Thanks

The Taliban swept to power a year after first organizing its efforts. Why? Because the “victors” in the anti-Soviet campaign were viciously corrupt warlords.

The Taliban are resurgent, despite being clobbered by the US and etc. Why? In largest part, it is a replay of 1994; the Karzai government is dominated by viciously corrupt warlords, and many of them the same individuals.

Do they (Dostum, Farhim, Ismael Khan, etc) have no shame from their earlier defeat?

Can we not see that this is the binary choice facing the country? Despite billions in aid, this is where the country is irresistibly drawn, a choice between murderous kleptocracy and theocratic despotism.

I conclude by saying that, as bad as the Taliban are, they are preferable to Dostum, Farhim and their ilk.

She writes more on her website and blog: http://www.sarahchayes.net/

She recently spoke about the elections being totally corrupt… as she foresaw in July in this interview, which I recommend, with Rachel Maddow about why she has become an advisor to McChrystal and ISAF:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWFMGv7-wyE

and here on 9/16/09 about the corruption “sham” of the recent election. It sounds like it should have led to a run-off with Abdullah Abdullah. At the moment, she says this ( illegitimacy) puts the whole US/int’l strategy in question.

I am comparing what I hear from Sarah Chayes with Rory Stewart’s with Chris (and previously here) and, the other day, interviews with George Packer, Wilkerson Daniel Ellsberg ( yes he of the Pentagon Papers)…. where they intersect, where they differ.I totally appreciate all of this discussion.

This is a big issue for us, for Obama’s presidency, and not the least at all for the Afghanistani people. And, I don’t think it is so easy as being about “empire”- which I don’t believe really can be in this globalized world.

So thank you for Rory Stewart’s very well articulated nuanced view.

In the meantime, if the u.s. admitted these wars were wrong, and that its state-building efforts are, as Rory Stewart believes, a lost cause… a flood of new questions arise: what responsibility do we have to repay for the enormous destruction and literally countless deaths we’ve done to the people in Iraq and Afghanistan (in some material, ethical way, and on someone else’s terms), rather than rebuild the ‘states’ “our” way, according to ‘our’ designs? It’s great to hear someone at the Carr Center criticize the ‘counterinsurgency’ (Rory is a much needed counterbalance to Sarah Sewell in that way), but when it fails, the u.s. should be very careful to resist blaming the Afghan and Iraqi people for the mess it finds itself in, until ‘we’ in the u.s. face the contradictions and outright crimes of “our” history that is now forever entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq.

http://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Philosophies/dp/1581152035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253364032&sr=1-1

…Which explores the relations between Eastern and Western thought. (A good subject for an interview.) Never the twain shall meet, but they do, have. A polite distance free of bombs perhaps the best way of going about things.

So, would not the appropriate analogy be (considering the overwhelming portion of our economy is defense) we must keep warring?

Afghanistan is the perfect setting to conduct war games…it is so disparate that we can project a lack of feeling…the lack of a cohesive resistance tempers our guilt.

To rationalize the continued spending on missiles, we must create a demand for missiles, and thus we must find a place to spend the missiles we currently have. Afghanistan is delightful in its non-confrontationality.