A Thought on Afghanistan

Thomas Friedman of The New York Times offers a salient observation on our recent foreign policy experience as applied to what to do in Afghanistan.

We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan...when I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it.

America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and they languish.

Andrew Sullivan makes a similar observation on The Daily Dish.

I guess what I suspect is that much of what the US is trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan is basically undoable. Success comes when the locals shift - like the Anbar Awakening. Perhaps there are things we can do to help such shifts. But we cannot force them or shape them very effectively. And right now, most of the underlying shifts are with our enemies.

As Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins has said, “people do not change when we tell them they should. They change when they tell themselves they must.”

--Ballard Burgher